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
Lucy (*Australopithecus afarensis*) lived about 3 million years ago. The first things we’d look at and call “our ancestors” in that way aren’t much older, maybe 6 million years at most. Until *Homo erectus* these beings exclusively lived in east-to-south Africa and were a pretty small part of the ecosystem there.
Dinisaurs (excluding birds) existed for **200 million years** and for almost all of that time they were the dominant large life on the planet.
So not only have we been around for, like, 1/40 the time as they were, but we’re also a handful of species that lived in one small part of the world for most of that time. ‘Dinosaur’ isn’t one lineage like hominids – ‘dinosaur’ means *millions* of species over that time, in every possible niche – big, small, apex predator, little bug eater, jurassic equivalent of a cow, etc.
There’s LOADS of individual dinosaur species that have less fossil evidence than Lucy’s species – most are known from only one single fossil find.
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