[cubefox]

I'd bet stone weathers many orders of magnitude less than dinosaur bones.

[JumpCrisscross]

Fossils are stone. The porous bone that housed the minerals are long gone by the time we find them.

[cubefox]

We are talking about actual bones in living animals though, and those surely fossilize (preserve over eons) much more rarely than many civilizational artifacts.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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]

But surely it is much more unlikely that animal bones would last for a hundred millennia.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.

[cubefox]

Because processed stones are much more massive than bones, which mostly rot away quite quickly.