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
Our ancestors were around for… 3-8 million years depending on what you consider an ancestor. Dinosaurs were around for at *least* 228 million years.
In addition to the lack of a mass extinction event to preserve large numbers of fossils, we just… haven’t been around very long.
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