Why so many old remains of different animals and almost no remains of humans
score:10
Three main reasons:
The timeline of interest for Homo Sapiens ancestors is very much shorter, on the order of 5 million years compared to the 180+ million years for dinosaurs.
The geographic range of that small set of species is very much smaller, restricted to a portion of central Africa compared to virtually the entire Earth for dinosaurs.
The number of species is very much smaller, being for proto-humans merely a subset of an already small taxonomic family, the Great Apes (Hominidae), whereas the dinosaurs are an entire clade of reptiles that spanned thousands, if not tens of thousands, of species.
The combination of these factors introduces perhaps 6 or more orders of magnitude difference in total population size over species lifetime. it is not surprising at all that there are vastly more fossils of dinosaurs than there are of hominids.
A better comparison than that of proto-humans to all dinosaurs would be the a comparison to a single small family of dinosaurs, of roughly the same size of humans and with a similarly restricted range. There are only few dinosaur species with a large number of fossils - but there were a huge number of total species over the 60 or so million years that they ranged the Earth.
Re: dinosaurs being reptiles - From my comments below:
My reading of the Physiology section of the The Wikipedia article on dinosaurs, which goes into extensive detail on that question, is that it comes down firmly that whether warm-blooded or cold-blooded, all known dinosaurs from more than ~60,000,000 years ago are in fact reptiles.
Note that from about 230 million years ago to the present, the "age of dinosaurs and birds" covers nearly half the entire time that multi-cellular animal life has existed on Earth (at ~600 million years). To think that any particular taxonomic group is unable to change a significant feature over that time is - naive in the extreme.
More post
- 📝 Why doesn't Eusebius of Caesarea mention Julian calendar in his Chronicle?
- 📝 What was the fastest coal-powered ship in a country's navy?
- 📝 What plane would have been used to airdrop someone into occupied Europe?
- 📝 Were Russian recruits ever chained?
- 📝 During and right after the French Revolution, how did France maintain and operate such a big army all over Europe?
- 📝 Are there historical texts in England querying where Roman structures came from?
- 📝 Were the Nazis the first to use phenol as a means of execution?
- 📝 Did France actually intend to colonise West Australia and were any resources assigned to this objective prior to 1829?
- 📝 Why did antique guns and swords from the Franco-Prussian War make part of the demilitarization program to which Germany was subjected?
- 📝 How was Enguerrand VII de Coucy able to keep his allegiance to both king of England and France during the Hundred Years War?
- 📝 What percentage of people were acquitted in "Stalin's trials"
- 📝 What was the state of relations between Baathist Iraq and Taliban Afghanistan?
- 📝 Were taxes from senatorial provinces and imperial provinces sent to their respective treasuries in the Roman Empire? (Under the rule of Augustus)
- 📝 The Constitution of the United States: Background material for the original, esp. the Bill of Rights?
- 📝 How many people died in the British Isles from religious persecution between 1532 and 1791?
- 📝 How was the relation between the Ottoman Empire and Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro during the Second Balkan War?
- 📝 Why were ancient cities protected by walls?
- 📝 Did men and women feast together in early medieval East Francia?
- 📝 Did the Governor of Virginia in 1786 have the authority to veto laws passed by the Virginia General Assembly?
- 📝 Did the Germans have enough bombers to conduct "strategic" bombing of the Soviet Union?
- 📝 What kind of clothing was worn in Mahgreb states circa the high medieval period?
- 📝 "No sane man will dance."? When / where / about-what did Cicero say this?
- 📝 What is the name of the theory opposite to the Great Man theory?
- 📝 Did anyone in Alta California pay in cash?
- 📝 How much is known about the Earl of Sandwich's sandwich?
- 📝 Where did the archived discussions in Google Groups come from?
- 📝 Were there records kept of French nobility before the invasion of England in 1066?
- 📝 Did people in the area the Virgin Mary is said to have lived wear headdresses at the time?
- 📝 Were/are the Gaels, Picts and Britons physically distinct?
- 📝 Ancient Civilization in non-Egyption Africa?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 Why so many old remains of different animals and almost no remains of humans
- 📝 Why were old fortifications shaped like stars and not like circles?
- 📝 If the Union Jack joins the flag of England and Scotland, why does it have a different shade of blue than the Scottish flag?
- 📝 Why did the Monitor and Merrimac (aka Virginia) have such radically different designs?
- 📝 Why was gold so popular and valuable back when it did not have many real world uses?
- 📝 Why did few French and no Dutch pilots (but many Poles and Czechs) take part in the Battle of Britain?
- 📝 Why did Homer’s Greeks sack so many cities in the Trojan War? Does it make them mostly pirates and slave raiders?
- 📝 Why did Russia set up so many cities in Siberia and Far East?
- 📝 Why did Empress Elizabeth and Catherine the Great of Russia have such different policies toward Frederick the Great?
- 📝 Why were there so many Japanese Prime Ministers before and during WW2?
- 📝 Why have wheat and rice been consumed in different forms?
- 📝 How old was Murasaki Shikibu when she married her second cousin? And why did she marry him?
- 📝 Why did Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng receive different punishments for their role in the Xi'an Incident?
- 📝 Why did Germany have so many important scientists and thinkers around the turn of the 20th century?
- 📝 Why did Henry I imprison his older brother and rival Robert for almost 30 years instead of having him killed?
- 📝 Why do many Indian Languages have different alphabets?
- 📝 Why did so large places of vastly different cultures and histories unite as India?
- 📝 Why did emperors of India and China have so many mistresses?
- 📝 Why do very old arts (paintings, sculptures) look pretty inaccurate and abstract?
- 📝 Why are there holidays marking VE/VJ/Armistice Day in different cultures, while many other wars aren't commemorated at their conclusion?
- 📝 why were animals domesticated? (for meat and fur)
- 📝 Why are Germans referred to so differently in different languages?
- 📝 Why China was able to unify and not Europe?
- 📝 Why does the United States keep using "old" date representations and imperial system, while being in the minority?
- 📝 Why is the consensus that WW2 started on September 1, 1939 and not July 7, 1937?
- 📝 Why did North America economically prosper, and maintain stable government and South/Central America didn't?
- 📝 Why exactly did telegraphs have to use "STOP" instead of a period and "QUOTE" instead of a quotation mark? (Or special codes.)
- 📝 Why didn't France and the UK invade Germany in September 1939?
- 📝 Why Were Madagascar and New Zealand Discovered So Late?
- 📝 Why are the German and French languages so different?