How is it that some dinosaur bones don’t decompose after millions of years? What keeps them so well preserved compared to the remains of dead animals normally?
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Things that get fossilized got buried really quickly after they died. This means that they’re less exposed to the elements and anything that wants to eat them doesn’t have oxygen with which to fuel it (this is the same reason we air seal food in the fridge to keep it more fresh). The overwhelming majority of remains, even those that do get buried relatively quickly, don’t survive for millions of years, though. Fossils are exceptional.
Because they aren’t bone anymore.
Dinosaur fossils are just that, fossils, and they go through a process called fossilization, specifically mineralization, where over years and years trapped underground the organics in the bone are gradually replaced by inorganic minerals.
Fossils aren’t bone anymore is how. When an animals dies in just the right place with just the right conditions the bones are slowly replaced with what is essentially rock. It is very rare for this to happen which is why we don’t have billions and billions of fossils.
Most animals die and their bodies are exposed to the wild. Other animals come by and eat them and the bones are left to the wind and rain and sun and scavengers. On very rare occasions, the body of the dead animal will be protected from the elements and scavengers by mud or sand or tar or something similar. When this happens, the bones will “fossilize”. That means that the bone is VERY slowly turned to stone in a process called “mineralization”. So the fossils you see in museums aren’t bone anymore, they are stone that “moved in” to where bone once was.
They do.
They aren’t.
In certain circumstances, Dinosaur bones decompose in a specific way to be replaced by minerals. This is “fossilization”. There is no bone of any dinosaur still remaining anywhere. It’s all fossils. They’re all bone shaped rocks.
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