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
Put things into perspective, if history was an hour long, humans like us have existed for about 1 minute and 30 seconds.
Dinosaurs on the other hand lived on earth 40 minutes.
Now humans like us is very specific, it’s the same as counting all the Golden retrievers you see in a day, where as dinosaurs is very broad, it’s like counting all the animals you see in a day.
So if you had a minute and a half to find every golden retriever in your neighborhood you may see 2 or 3, but if you had 40 minutes to count every animal, bird, squirrel, cat, ant, fly, spider, chipmunk, you’d probably see hundreds!
If they follow that, you can get even more detailed by highlighting habitats. Golden retrievers in your neighborhood live in houses, but animals can live everywhere. Every tree has birds, every lawn has worms and ants, every flower has bees,.
Humans like us lived in really specific places, if your house is a metaphor of earth, humans like us spent a lot of time occupying what’s basically the bedroom closet, where as dinosaurs could live in the entire house.
That’s probably a good point to leave it at but you could also get into bigger pieces of things being easier to find after decay and erosion and such but that may be too grim.
Fossilization is extremely rare. Finding fossils from a specific strata is also extremely rare. And ancient humans didn’t live all over earth like dinosaurs did. So that’s triply rare.
Fossils are comparatively rare since they need super specific conditions in order to form – you need to die near a body of water, not be carried off or otherwise mauled too badly by scavengers, get covered in the right kind of sediments and water, and then your body of water needs to dry up and the rocks where you fossilized need to erode enough for your fossil or someone else’s nearby to be discovered. The chances are like crazy small.
There were tons of different dinosaurs alive all over the world for a 200 million years.
Humanity has only been around for a few million and most of those concentrated in a few small areas.
So it is just that there were more dinosaurs here in more places for much more time.
Lots of great answers here, but I’d like to add another explanation to the bunch:
The creation of fossils is a rare process. First, consider the fact that one of the leading causes of death in the natural world is being eaten by a predator. Living things have to die in a way that leaves remains in order to leave behind a fossil. Even once remains are left behind, they must be buried in a place where fossilization can occur – that is, certain minerals slowly replace the bones and other tissues of the remains, while the dirt and/or stone around the remains keeps a different composition.
Fossils aren’t actually the remains of the dead thing, but rather an impression of the remains that shows us what the dead thing looked like when it died. It’s sort of like making a plaster cast of a dead person’s hand by first making a mold of a it, and then letting their hand rot away completely before pouring the plaster – except it all has to happen completely by accident. It’s also possible for fossils to be destroyed by geologic activity long after they’ve formed.
Though it seems like there are a lot of fossils today, they represent a very small percentage of all of the things that have ever lived and died. There is still so much we don’t know about creatures like the dinosaurs, and it’s likely we will never know even half of all there is to know about them. It’s pretty incredible that we know as much as we do about our near ancestors.
Size. Bigger fossils survive longer. It’s suspected that there were many times as many smaller dinos, but their bones didn’t survive.
Fossilization takes a specific series of events and most of how a human skeleton would be left aren’t that. Skeletons decompose if they’re on the surface or just buried in dirt.
This is one of the reasons the precise locations of ancient battlefields are disputed. All the skeletons of the slain are *gone,* there’s nothing to look for.
Significant human archeological finds are either those that did fossilize, or ones that were placed beyond normal elements. Tombs, volcanic ash, that sort of thing.
The most popular place for a primitive settlement is on a fresh-water river, but near the ocean. This gives you fresh water, and fresh-water fish.
Being near the ocean gives you access to salt-water fish and also salt, which is not a trivial consideration. Salt is vital for life, and it can cure meats to store it for wintertime. Most people don’t know this because we now naturally get almost too much salt in our food without even trying.
12,000 years ago, north America was covered by a glacier. then, in the fairly rapid timeline of about 1,000 years, it all melted. We don’t know why, but we have some clues about asteroid strikes. Either way the glaciers melted and the ocean rose about 300 feet.
It can take many hundreds of miles of range to reach a change of 300 feet in altitude when you are near the ocean. Where the shallow part of the ocean floor drops off is called the “continental shelf”. If you look at the Hudson river (New York), as soon as the water flow hits the ocean its velocity dissipates and spreads out, which causes the river floor to stop eroding.
If you look at a map of the ocean floor by the outlet of the Hudson river, there is a river bed cut across the continental shelf along the axis of the Hudson. When the ocean was 300 feet shallower, the “beach” was about 200 miles farther along than it is now. The settlements for ancient societies were on the what is now the continental shelf.
There is another problem, though. If a skeleton is exposed to ocean creatures, even the bones will decay and be consumed.
Of course there were villages in just about every region, but…the large settlements that were frequently occupied by millions of descendants through the eons, will be found on the continental shelf, 300 feet down and a couple hundred miles off shore.
Our ancestors pretty much only lived around 3 million years ago. Dinosaurs lived for over 200 million years so naturally they left more remains.
Trying to keep it simple
1) humans and our ancestor species (eg homo erectus, homo habilis, etc) have not been round for that long. Only about 2 million years for the various homo species. You could maybe expand it to 20 million to include other great ape ancestors. So thinking about similar skeletons from a 6 year olds point of view
Dinosaurs wee around for about 175 million years so you can imagine there were lots more of them overall
2) “dinosaurs” will cover sooooo many species. Could show the kid pictures of different birds to explain they are all birds but all different to help explain that they are thinking about more animals than just one type.
3) dinosaurs covered a lot of the earth so you can find potentially find their skeletons all around the world. But early on humans only lived in a relatively small area in east Africa. So we will only find early human bodies in that area
4) im not so sure about this but, but it’s a slightly education speculation. It is really unusual to find a whole dinosaur skeleton. But if you consider the size of the large dinosaurs, there is literally a lot of bone. So if only a small part of it gets preserved, e.g 10%, it’s potentially a relatively large piece on bone.
But a human skeleton is obviously much smaller to start with. So if only 10% of a human skeleton survives, that is really small and easily over looked.
Latest Answers