alt Hacker News> Any small sculpture buried in clay can survive for an eternity.
If it's made of granite, maybe. But how many granite sculptures have you seen? Sculptors tend to prefer prettier and more easily shaped materials, like marble and limestone. Those happen to be mostly calcium carbonate, just like bones and teeth, so section 1.2 in [1] (chemical dissolution in acidic environments) applies, along with section 1.3 and [2] (mechanical fracturing and dispersion during wetting-drying cycles).
Even if your sculpture was buried in a maximally favorable environment, it would not have stayed that way over tens of millions of years. 50 million years ago, the Himalayas were just starting to rise as India crashed into Eurasia, Australia was waving goodbye to a forest-covered Antarctica while the Americas, North and South, had yet to link up. At a rate of one ice age every 100k years, 500 ice ages separate us from those days. One is enough to raze half a continent and turn a muddy seabed into granite.
> Skin? Like, with clothes on, or the shape of clothes? And shoes and hiking gear? Footprints with the shape of boots?
This is extremely anthropocentric. A hypothetical "Silurian" civilization would obviously not have been human, and may have had no need for such things. Would bears endowed with human-level intelligence want to wear clothes and boots?
> Drawings "I LOVE YOU" in the sand?
Have any such preserved drawings in the sand been found from the ~200k years humans have been around?
> The shape of a coca-cola bottle buried in solidified clay?
See section 1.3 in [1], and remember that the time scale discussed in that kind of paper is a few thousand years, not tens of millions.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971...
[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/0197136978063731...
> how many granite sculptures have you seen?
We use enormous amounts of it in construction, cut to precise shapes.
> just like bones and teeth
Of which we have ample amounts of fossils. Even included in marble, which is itself hundreds of millions of years old.
> it would not have stayed that way over tens of millions of years.
So we don't have fossils from hundreds of millions of years ago?
> Would bears endowed with human-level intelligence want to wear clothes and boots?
Absolutely if they had a civilisation capable of producing climate change. We're talking about at least a billion individuals living in all environments on Earth, from the tropics to the arctic, and doing all things an advanced civilization does: farming, mining, building, transporting, exploring etc. At least elements of technical clothing are needed in many of these activities.
> See section 1.3 in [1]
You keep repeating an argument that disproves the possibility of all fossils. Really you can't understand that it's contradicted by facts?