As a child, I was always told that when the dinosaurs died, they eventually got broken down into crude oil, which get refined into a list of products.
Well I seen a post somewhere that was saying the crude oil wasn’t made from dinosaurs. So if it’s not made from the remains of the dinos, how it is made then.
In: 93
1. Most fossil fuel is much older than dinosaurs.
2. Terrestrial biomass (plants and animals that live on the ground) usually formed coal instead of petroleum. Petroleum is mostly from marine plankton.
3. The amount of biomass from big animals like vertebrae is actually rather small compared to plants and plankton. It doesn’t contribute significantly.
The reason you were taught that it’s from dinosaurs is because that’s fun and memorable. The point that fossil fuels are created from organic matter still comes across.
And to anticipate the obvious question: the reason oil can be drilled for on land, even though it was formed by marine organisms, is that oceans weren’t always where they are now. That’s the reason you can sometimes find fossilized shells and stuff in certain rocks.
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