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
- 📝 Was red associated with "stop" or "danger" before railroads?
- 📝 Was there relative peace in the Middle East before the end of the Great War?
- 📝 Name of Kingdom that was formed after marriage refusal?
- 📝 When did the Royal Navy start to fill a given rank of admiral with more than one officer?
- 📝 Proportionally speaking, how many European refugees were accepted by Middle Eastern and African countries during World War 2?
- 📝 Did Franco consider Hitler a "son of the Catholic Church" who "died while defending Christianity"?
- 📝 What were the casualties and ship damage on each side of the Battle of Plum Point Bend, Tennessee?
- 📝 How do nations maintain sovereignty over conquered nations?
- 📝 Were people in the Neo-Assyrian or Achaemenid Empire aware of the empires before them?
- 📝 Has a state ever "attacked" another one by printing fake money?
- 📝 What is the structure in front of the entrance to Menkaure's pyramid?
- 📝 Why did the population of Descartes, France increase by so much in the 1960's?
- 📝 Were there nurses stationed at Bude, Cornwall, UK during WW2?
- 📝 Did anyone predict the death of the Sun before science?
- 📝 What is the earliest passage that describes Hippocrates' observation that blood stratifies into four layers?
- 📝 Would Hannibal's men have known about his strategies?
- 📝 What is the origin of 3 meals a day?
- 📝 Is the following claim concerning the loss of classical Latin literature substantiated?
- 📝 Compare skeleton crew to normal crew on a galleon
- 📝 How much of the Jonestown money actually got given to the USSR?
- 📝 Is there any truth to the claim that freed slaves who moved to Liberia enslaved the local population?
- 📝 Why was Goguryeo able to expand rapidly under Gwanggaeto's rule?
- 📝 Why did USSR lay down undersea communications cable between Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok?
- 📝 Is there any evidence of modern technology today that has been rediscovered?
- 📝 What were the international space arrangements and scientific purposes Eisenhower spoke of in October 1957?
- 📝 Why was California admitted as one big state rather than split up?
- 📝 Were women banned from entering the castle of Trakai?
- 📝 "Dominion" of Canada?
- 📝 Did Nazi leaders consider continuing guerrilla warfare after the collapse of Germany?
- 📝 Did any carriage manufacturers make the transition to automobile building?
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?
