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 are lots of dinosaur fossils because there were lots of dinosaurs living and dying across the entire Earth for a very long time, compared to a relatively short time and relatively few individuals in a small area for human ancestors.
The dinosaurs “ruled the earth” for almost 200 million years, starting in an era where all the modern continents were joined together in a single landmass, and “dinosaur” is a huge group that includes thousands of known species, and almost certainly millions of species that are either undiscovered or for which no evidence remains today. Lucy’s species, *Australopithecus afarensis,* existed for roughly one million years in one region of east Africa.
Dinosaurs are also helped by the fact that larger animals are more likely to be fossilized and survive into the present day, simply due to the higher durability of larger bones. An animal’s habitat also affects the likelihood of fossilization, as some environments are very destructive to deceased remains.
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