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
in addition to -^ other comments: the chances any given skeleton will fossilize is actually vanishingly small and highly dependent on environment. conditions have to be just right chemically, the bones have to escape the attentions of scavengers, etc. Otherwise given the 2 billion years’ worth of multicellular life on this planet, we’d be up to our ears in fossils.
in the case of hominids/human ancestors, you’re looking at a lot of plains and scrublands, which are pretty dry most of the time and also full to the tits with predators & scavengers who would have destroyed any hominid corpse they came across. honestly it’s kind of a miracle that we have as many fossilized hominid remains as we do.
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