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

For several dozen million years dinosaurs were the dominant kind of animals on the planet. That is, basically almost every medium- and large-size land animal was a dinosaur during that very long time period. While our ancestors have only existed for a few million years and constitute just a handful of species. And also for the most part of those years they’ve been confined to just one continent – Africa.

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