A thing puzzled me while watching programs

[RockRaven]

2. As a total ignoramus/amateur, I will take a shot at answering...

As far as I am aware with my limited understanding, fossils are much more fragile and much less durable than the original article they represent. So one sees a bone or a shell equivalent and tries to dig it out or carve into it... and it breaks or crumbles. They can be very fragile/friable, and what techniques/chemistry/materials were the ancients working with... Not much compared to today.

And without the background knowledge of deep time, novel species, etc, that we have these days, at best a fossil is a curiosity but a very fussy difficult to manipulate curiosity not easily identifiable as unique (except perhaps in the case of gigantic ones). Current articles/specimens would be better fodder for art used as grave goods, because of ease of use. That may account for the lack of preserved ancient-manipulated specimens.

Maybe this is apocryphal/BS but I seem to recall hearing someone speculate that the myths about cyclops/one-eyed-giants could have originated with elephant-related fossils in Southern Europe/Eastern Med. So the ancients may have had a decent amount of contact with fossils, just without their preservation to the present nor explicitly identifying them as such at the time.