Eli5 why do we find so many dinosaur skeletons but so few skeletons of our own ancestors like Lucy?

Question

An actual 6 year-old asked me the question today. I was at a loss.

**Edit**: a lot of interesting answers, food for thought, and ideas on how to explain it to a child. Many thanks to the community!

If I summarize:

* Dinosaurs lived for a very (very) long time, all over the earth, and there were countless different species of them.
* There were few of our ancestors, from just a few species, and most of their existence was confined to limited geographical areas.
* The conditions for a fossil to form are extremely rare, and they may have been even rarer for our ancestors than they were for dinosaurs.

In: 819

Answer 1

Lots of great answers here, but I’d like to add another explanation to the bunch:

The creation of fossils is a rare process. First, consider the fact that one of the leading causes of death in the natural world is being eaten by a predator. Living things have to die in a way that leaves remains in order to leave behind a fossil. Even once remains are left behind, they must be buried in a place where fossilization can occur – that is, certain minerals slowly replace the bones and other tissues of the remains, while the dirt and/or stone around the remains keeps a different composition.

Fossils aren’t actually the remains of the dead thing, but rather an impression of the remains that shows us what the dead thing looked like when it died. It’s sort of like making a plaster cast of a dead person’s hand by first making a mold of a it, and then letting their hand rot away completely before pouring the plaster – except it all has to happen completely by accident. It’s also possible for fossils to be destroyed by geologic activity long after they’ve formed.

Though it seems like there are a lot of fossils today, they represent a very small percentage of all of the things that have ever lived and died. There is still so much we don’t know about creatures like the dinosaurs, and it’s likely we will never know even half of all there is to know about them. It’s pretty incredible that we know as much as we do about our near ancestors.