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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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.
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