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

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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.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

There were a lot more dinosaurs over a much longer period of time than there have been hominins. The earliest hominins are something like six million years old, while the dinosaurs* were around for something like 135 million years. They were also distributed all over the globe while we spent much of that time exclusively in Africa.

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* Speaking specifically about non-avian dinosaurs here, since I know someone will bring up the distinction.

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