You’ve probably heard that oil is made from dinosaurs and thought you were injecting refined Velociraptor directly into your Volvo at the gas station. Although this idea is widely spread, it is not true. Oil isn’t made from the rotting corpses of ancient dinosaurs.
“For some strange reason, many people have this idea that oil came from dinosaurs,” said Radar Müller, a geologist at the University of Oslo. science norway. “But oil comes from trillions of tiny algae and plankton.”
Tens to hundreds of millions of algae and plankton died, years ago, they sank to the bottom of the ocean, where they were deposited and buried under layers of sediment. Eventually, after millions of years of high pressure, hypoxia The environment, algae, and plankton areCooked“Then it turned into that sticky black oil that we humans clearly can’t get enough of, despite the threat of a climate emergency. From here, it seeps upwards and becomes impassable when it hits a rock. , a hole must be dug out by humans (or released again by some other natural disaster).
On the other hand, marine dinosaurs – or tyrannosaurus It was discovered that its arms were not well-suited for swimming, meaning it might be at the bottom of the ocean after death. unlikely They themselves will be converted into oil.
This is partially due to oxygen deficiency condition An environment is needed to convert organic matter into oil. If it died, it would have been eaten by small aquatic creatures and dismembered into bones long before being buried.
Here’s why “if dinosaurs really existed” their bones wouldn’t be everywhere.