[Poser]

Fossils are not rare. They are quite plentiful in many locations. When I was a kid, our entire stone wall was built with rocks littered with fossils of trilobites and other prehistoric animals.

We find fossils of all sorts of things all over the earth, but I can't seem to recall ever finding a chimp or a man or an elephant or a manatee, a cat, a cow, a gorilla, a trout, a goat, a sheep or much of any animal not extinct.

Is there a non-fossilizing gene or are the fossils just more ancient than man?

[muawiyah]

Fossil trilobites are rare compared to the original numbers of trilobites. Plus, they are found in certain limestone layers and not in others.

I like the big ones that you can put in your sidewalk ~ I only have small ones, but I have TRIVALVES as well as CORAL STALKS MADE OUT OF SILICON.

The wife took a bunch of them down to the Smithsonian years ago to have "judged" and it was all she could do to keep the examiner from pocketing them.

Now you want something that's NOT RARE you take your typical geode!

[Big_Monkey]

"Is there a non-fossilizing gene or are the fossils just more ancient than man?

It's a numbers game - simple mathematics. Trilobites were on the planet for hundreds of millions of years, and probably in much, much greater numbers than man is even today. Human beings have only been in North American for about 12K years, hardly enough time to build any fossile base, but certainly not enough time to build a fossil base as long and as deep as one for you trilobites.

As for the rest of the world, this principle still holds true. Homo sapiens have only been on earth for 50k-60k years. It stands to mathematical reason that other species would outnumber human fossil on a exponential level. Thus, you find a lot more of others than of humans or their evolutionary precursors.