So far in the history of science, paleontologists have named around 1,000 distinct dinosaur species. That sounds like a lot - but when you do the math on how long dinosaurs ruled (165 million years) and how many species probably existed at any one time, the real number was likely in the tens of thousands. We’ve found maybe 1% of them.
Fossilization is incredibly rare. For a body to become a fossil, it has to be buried very fast, in the right kind of sediment, in the right chemistry, and stay buried for millions of years without being crushed, dissolved, or eaten by erosion. The vast majority of dinosaurs simply rotted away.
The good news: we’re still finding new ones constantly. On average, paleontologists name a new dinosaur species roughly every week somewhere in the world. There’s plenty more to discover.
