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
There’s a lot of kinds of animals that we consider dinosaurs, and relatively few that we consider our own ancestors. Most of the extinct dinosaur species we know of we have very few skeletons of. We’ve found only 32 adult T rex skeletons, compared to over 300 Australopithecus.
I know that the conditions of topography and geology that allowed fossils to be preserved were/are rare. So paleontology only gets a small glimpse of prehistoric animal kingdoms through fossils. Most animals lived and died without any record of their existence. Extending this line of reasoning, maybe early humans were better at avoiding the “fossil maker” conditions than their animal counterparts.
Lack of time spend around, less individuals of each species mainly. Like dinosaur is the name for literally thousands of species over tens of millions of years, to do the comparison you’d have to compare it 1 to 1 with any one dinosaur species. The odds of a Skeleton being fossilised and surviving is pretty small, there was just lots of dinosaurs over a long long time that inevitably some survived
in addition to -^ other comments: the chances any given skeleton will fossilize is actually vanishingly small and highly dependent on environment. conditions have to be just right chemically, the bones have to escape the attentions of scavengers, etc. Otherwise given the 2 billion years’ worth of multicellular life on this planet, we’d be up to our ears in fossils.
in the case of hominids/human ancestors, you’re looking at a lot of plains and scrublands, which are pretty dry most of the time and also full to the tits with predators & scavengers who would have destroyed any hominid corpse they came across. honestly it’s kind of a miracle that we have as many fossilized hominid remains as we do.
My old physiology teacher said there’s a 1 in a million chance that an organism will fossilize, there’s a 1 in a million chance that fossil will survive until today, and there’s a 1 in a million chance we’ll find that surviving fossil.
One more thing to add…. you can find lots of human remains, in graveyards. Humans have tended to always bury and mark the dead. So there is just less of us scattered around all over.
I had thought that maybe our ancestors aren’t as deep in the earth and various things like weather and animals maybe just wrecked our bones.
Apart from the number reason others have said I’d expect there one other factor.
Dinosaurs are mostly huge. However one died it’s pretty unlikely any other animal is tearing it to pieces or consuming the bones. Wind and water is unlikely to move it much. Even the biggest human bone (femur) could form a pretty tasty chew for many animals
There have been a lot more dinosaurs than humans on the planet. In terms of how long dinosaurs were on the planet compared to how long we’ve been on it, it’s like comparing how long someone’s eyes are closed while napping (the dinosaurs) vs someone blinking (us).
So there’s just a lot more dead dinosaurs to find than dead humans.
Lucy and similar specimens probably only numbered a few thousand individuals for a period of about 10,000 years. Dinosaurs number in their millions and were around for millions of years so there are a lot more to find.
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