Many People Have No Idea Where Oil Actually Comes From. It's Not Dinosaurs

At some point, you have probably heard somewhere that oil comes from dinosaurs, as if every time you fill up at the gas station, you are pumping refined velociraptor into your Volvo. It’s a vivid image, but it’s not true. Despite how widespread the belief is, oil isn’t made from decomposed dinosaurs.

“For some strange reason, the idea that oil comes from dinosaurs has stuck with many people," geologist Reidar Müller from the University of Oslo explained to Science Norway. "But oil comes from trillions of tiny algae and plankton."

As algae and plankton died tens to hundreds of millions of years ago, they sank to the bottom of the sea, where they accumulated and were buried by layers and layers of sediment. Eventually, after millions of years in a high-pressure and low-oxygen environment, the algae and plankton got "cooked" and turned into that sticky black oil we humans apparently can't get enough of, despite the threat of a climate emergency. From here, it seeps upwards until it hits rock it can't make it through, requiring humans to drill it out (or some other natural disaster to set it free again).

While marine dinosaurs – or a T. Rex that discovered its arms weren't particularly well-adapted to swimming – may find themselves on the bottom of the ocean after death, it's unlikely they would get converted into oil themselves. 

This is partly because an oxygen-deprived environment is needed to convert organic matter into oil. Once dead, they would have become a meal for smaller aquatic creatures, picking them apart until they got down to the bones, long before they could be buried.

Now to explain why, "if dinosaurs actually existed", their bones aren't everywhere.

An earlier version of this story was published in 2023.