Dinosaurs bad influence on children and never existed

yipeeeee wrote: »

How many dinosaurs have they actually found?

You would think there would be millions of bones remains seems they existed for 100s of millions of years.

There are "millions" of dino bones already found. In some areas they're actually common. Whole skeletons of individuals are much rarer. Very broadly speaking there are two types of fossil remains, life assemblages and death assemblages. The former is where an animal falls down dead and is rapidly covered by soil/water/bog/volcanic ash and buried, so apart from the first scavengers to get there their bones remain altogether in pretty much the way they were in life. In the latter death assemblage animals die and are scavenged and broken up, maybe later their hard inedible parts like teeth and the like get washed into rivers and collect at the bend of same so what you find then are bits and pieces of the animals in layers, bone beds as it were.

The latter type of fossil is much more common for obvious reasons. Most animals are scavenged after death(even if they fall head first into water, the fishes will have their fill), far fewer are preserved in an instant. Ash from volcanic eruptions is a good one as it rapidly buries the animals and preserves the tissues, even sometimes the soft tissues from initial decay. QV Pompeii for a human example.

That's only the animals that get to be fossilised in the first place. The vast vast majority never did/will. They have to die in an area with the right type of deposits for a start, animals around or in water have a much better chance than those living at higher altitudes(hence we've far more records of sea creatures than land). Even when fossilised that's not the end of the story. If vulcanism kicks off in the strata the fossils are usually destroyed or bent out of shape to the point of being unrecognisable.

In the end chances are very high we have only a fraction of the animals that have lived preserved in rocks and we have many many gaps yet even so fossils are very common. Imagine a world where fossils never happened, we'd not have a clue about our distant past.