As someone who believes whole-heartedly in evolution, there's something I've never fully understood:
When animals die, their bones decompose. If they didn't, the woods would be absolutely full of deer skeletons, and our streets and rooftops would be covered in dead birds. This makes sense, right?
So then how do we have so many dinosaur skeletons? Do dinosaur bones not decompose?
Or, conversely, if the answer is "A very small number of dinosaur bones were preserved through unique circumstances" then how were we so lucky to find so many examples from that small number? Isn't that a hell of a needle in the haystack?
And, not quite the same question, but related: Many ancient civilizations have myths about dragons, which are essentially dinosaurs (except for the fire thing). But we didn't discover dinosaur bones until the 1800s. So how is it that we imagined these creatures and then discovered they were real?
Can someone explain this to me? Thank you.
Dinosaurs inhabited earth for almost 200 million years which translates in a gigantic amount of bones. So even if only a small percentage of these bones "survived", there is still a lot of (mineralized) bones in absolute numbers.
Earlier civilizations also discovered them but integrated their findings with their belief system (dragons, monsters,...). It is believed that the idea of Cyclops (one-eyed giants) actually origins in the misinterpretation of mammoth skulls that have a central hole for the trunk.