As much as it blows my mind that we can see the skeletons of creatures that lived over 65m years ago, that we can also see footprints boggles the mind.
I do often wonder how much of a slice we see though. Do those found dinosaurs represent 50% of those that lived? 5%? 0.5%? Less?
@craiggrannell Love this thought! The fossils we find represent an incredibly tiny fraction of the dinosaurs that lived, and in reality, you're far more likely to find traces left behind by a dinosaur than a body. You may personally leave behind millions of footprints in your lifetime, a small fraction of which could be preserved, but you only have one skeleton to have a chance at being fossilized!
@craiggrannell Further adding onto this, we only know about the bones and lives of dinosaurs in certain ecosystems, such as floodplains or deserts. We'll likely never know what a dinosaur living deep in the jungle or on the mountaintops looked like, simply because those environments don't provide the right conditions for fossilization.
@punkpaleo I should read up more on this (any pointers?) but this was the assumption I made while chatting about this at London’s Natural History Museum with my 9yo. (She ADORES dinosaurs, which is in part my ‘fault’ – I also was a dino nut as a kid, and remain fond of them.)
Glad I wasn’t too far off the mark while mulling things over with the kid! :D
@punkpaleo This, on the other hand, didn’t enter my mind at all. But in hindsight it makes so much sense. Law of averages and all that.
In all, sobering to think about how much we’ll never know about the past. But also awe-inspiring how much those in your field are able to ‘rediscover’ and present to the world. Thanks for all your efforts!
@craiggrannell@punkpaleo Surely, vastly less than 0.5%.
On the one hand, the conditions for fossilisation surely weren’t that commonly met; most specimen would have died and been eaten/decomposed rather than buried.
Second, for a species to keep going for millions of years, it needs a certain population. Common estimates for total number of pre-agricultural humans that ever lived are around 8-10 billion. And dinosaurs were around much longer than humans have.
@craiggrannell@punkpaleo Just re-read your post and realised you might be talking about number of species rather than specimen… in which case, apologies for the noise, I really don’t have an informed answer for that.
Add comment