Everyone Knows Oil Comes From Dinosaurs...

   One of my first fascinations I developed as a kid was with dinosaurs. But as I grew older something always kind of bothered me (among many other things) and that is the "fact" that oil comes from squished up, fermented dinosaurs. I never really contemplated it completely till yesterday at work...

     "As everyone knows, oil comes from dinosaurs." I remember as a kid seeing a cartoon spot explaining how dinosaurs gave the ultimate sacrifice so that one day us humans would have oil to run our cars and even recall being taught about "fossil fuels" in school. It seemed like truth to me at the time -- from the eyes of an eight year old. But if, as an adult, you really stop to give it some thought, doesn't the idea seem a little ridiculous?

    How could dinosaurs have possibly created the planet's vast oil fields? Did millions, or even billions, of them die at the very same time and at the very same place? And how did they all get buried so quickly? Because if they weren't buried right away, wouldn't they have just decomposed or been consumed by scavengers? And how much oil can you really squeeze from a pile of parched dinosaur bones? And how in the hell did they all get buried so deeply in the earth, out at sea or in the desert?


     Maybe there was some type of cataclysmic event that caused the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs and also buried them -- like the impact of an asteroid or a comet. But even so, you wouldn't think that all the dinosaurs would have been huddled together waiting to become oil fields. And besides, scientists apparently are now backing away from the mass extinction theory.

     It would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs to account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil in the Middle East. I don't know what the precise dinosaur-carcass-to-barrel-of-oil conversion rate is, but it does seem like it would take a hell of a lot of dead dinosaurs. Even if we generously allow that a single dinosaur could yield 50 barrels of oil (an absurd notion, but let's play along for now), more than 130 billion dinosaurs would have had to be simultaneously entombed in just one small region of the world. But were there really hundreds of billions of dinosaurs roaming the earth? If so, then one wonders why there is all this talk now of overpopulation and scarce resources, when all we are currently dealing with is a few billion humans populating the same earth.

     And why the Middle East? Was that region some kind of Mecca for dinosaurs? Was it the climate, or the lack of water and vegetation, that drew them there? Of course, the region could have been much different in prehistoric times. Maybe it was like the Great Valley in the Land Before Time movies. Or maybe the dinosaurs had to cross the Middle East to get to the Great Valley, but they never made it, because they got bogged down in the desert and ultimately became cans of 10W-30 motor oil.

    Why aren't there vast archaeological digs in the Middle East and why does it seem most "fossils" are found closer to the surface of the earth rather than buried deep? And in all of North America how is it that all the dinosaurs seemed to end up in Alberta to become tar sands? It seems that a lot of the oil reserves are found out at sea--has our planet really changed that much that huge areas that were once land are now completely submerged in hundreds of feet of ocean?

    It appears that, unbeknownst to Westerners, there have actually been, for quite some time now, two competing theories concerning the origins of petroleum...

     One theory claims that oil is an organic 'fossil fuel' deposited in finite quantities near the planet's surface. The other theory claims that oil is continuously generated by natural processes in the Earth's magma. One theory is backed by a massive body of research representing fifty years of intense scientific inquiry. The other theory is an unproven relic of the eighteenth century.

     One theory anticipates deep oil reserves, refillable oil fields, migratory oil systems, deep sources of generation, and the spontaneous venting of gas and oil. The other theory has a difficult time explaining any such documented phenomena.

    Everything involved in these sort of matters always turns out to be some sort of conspiracy theory--the "powers that be" are withholding information. But there are apparently vast oil reserves in Vietnam, Russia, the tar sands of Alberta and even off the coast of British Columbia. I'm not saying anything, I'm just sayin'...and come to think of it, is anybody really sure there were dinosaurs at all? 

     All these "skeleton remains" at the New York Museum of  Natural History were "artists renditions"...





     
       A lot of this information courtesy of the intro-webs.