When I was a kid, we used to explore the woods all the time. I came across a couple dead mice or birds in my time, but they were always recently deceased.
But tons of animals live and presumably die in the woods. Why aren’t the woods covered in deer and bear and raccoon skeletons? Where are all the bones going?
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My cat will eat the bones of virtually anything he comes across. Have a look at a cat’s molars some time, their jaws are legitimately bone-crushing machines. Many predators consume carcasses bones and all.
I learned recently that sites like Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump in Alberta had hundreds of years of burried bones pile up to the point that the cliffs are much less high than they were originally.
During WW(I?) they mined a lot of them for the phosphorous in the bones to make explosives. HSIBJ is one of the few untouched sites due to the relatively low phosphorous content of the bones there.
Good comments about bones breaking down or being eaten! Also: Opportunistic animals will scavenge small pieces of a carcass and move them away from the rest of the body to somewhere safer for them to eat it. That’s why it’s quite rare to find an intact skeleton, the pieces have been scattered and dragged away by animals. (Though my forensics instructor in college said the exception was human bodies that had high levels of methamphetamines in them…the animals leave those alone.)
To add:
Many forests throughout the world have omnivores like wild pigs or goats that’ll make short work of bones.
And in US forests, although you wouldn’t think so, cattle and deer do eat old bones (to get calcium). And sometimes even not so old bones for the bone marrow.
Fun fact.
All those processes and critters to consume the bones don’t exist in Antactica.
Those lovely panoramic shots of Antarctic penguin colonies, the film crew are almost certainly standing on decades of penguin corpses mixed in with a little dirt. It’s exactly as you asked, except the skeletons are still fleshy.
I knew people who had to dig a hole next to a penguin colony, five meters down they were still extracting intact preserved penguins.
Bones are only partially made of the hard calcium based stuff. A lot of marrow and even more is collagen(raw gelatin). This collagen rots, just like it would inside a piece of meat in damp enviorments like the forest floor. That only leaves a more porous and fragile bone that is easier to break and dissolve.
Scavangers and even deer and such also munch on bones, scavangers for food(marrow) and deer and such as a sort of natural vitamin gummy. Lots of healthy minerals in bones that are more difficult to get from just vegetable, leaf or grass food. So bones become natural salt licks.
And finally, bones dissolve over time. Rain is a bit acidic and so is the soil in many places. That slowly dissolves calcium based salts and washes them away.
And a final point is that predators and scavangers might eat more then you think. Mice, small to medium sized birds and such are not chewed of the bone by most creatures but swallowed whole. Owls puke up most hair and bones but most things just dissolve them in stomach acid. Smaller bones of larger animals might suffer a similar fate. Larger bones are also seperated from the animal skeleton as they are being dragged of.
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