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
because dinosaurs lived for millions of years before they went extinct
while “humans” as we know it (including the prehistoric ones–our ancestors), have only been around for approximately ~200,000 years.
that’s a massive amount of time difference.
still, there are quite an amount of human fossils though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils
Latest Answers