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
There’s a lot of kinds of animals that we consider dinosaurs, and relatively few that we consider our own ancestors. Most of the extinct dinosaur species we know of we have very few skeletons of. We’ve found only 32 adult T rex skeletons, compared to over 300 Australopithecus.
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