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Stone does weather too. It either needs uninterrupted dry climate (not really possible for millions of years) or being placed inside a stable geological formati
by rini17 3y ago
Stone does weather too. It either needs uninterrupted dry climate (not really possible for millions of years) or being placed inside a stable geological formation (we don't usually build that way).
- cubefox 3y agoI'd bet stone weathers many orders of magnitude less than dinosaur bones.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoFossils are stone. The porous bone that housed the minerals are long gone by the time we find them.
- cubefox 3y agoWe are talking about actual bones in living animals though, and those surely fossilize (preserve over eons) much more rarely than many civilizational artifacts.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> those surely fossilize (preserve over eons) much more rarely than many civilizational artifacts I don't think they would fossilise. It's a process specific to the porosity of organic tissue. They might be preserved, but the Cambridge paper explains why it’s unlikely they would last for a hundred millennia or more.
- cubefox 3y agoBut surely it is much more unlikely that animal bones would last for a hundred millennia.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> surely it is much more unlikely that animal bones would last for a hundred millennia Why? The Cambridge paper gives a scientist’s reasons for that not being the case being supposition.