It's been a long time—66 million years!—since the Cretaceous Period ended in explosive fashion, so there's a lot we don't know about our predecessors atop the food chain, the dinosaurs. Were they hot-blooded or cold-blooded, fast or slow, pack animals or lone hunters? What color were they, and what did they sound like? Could you really use one to make a record player, like the Flintstones did? Luckily, our Jeopardy! correspondent Ken Jennings has just published his seventh Junior Genius Guide, this one all about the dinosaurs! He's here all month to straighten us out on all the Mesozoic misinformation we thought we knew.
The Debunker: Is the Oil in Your Car Made from Dead Dinosaurs?
We call oil, coal, and gas "fossil fuels" because they were produced by the decomposition of animal life from hundreds of millions of years ago. For over eighty years, Sinclair Oil has been playing up this prehistoric connection: using a bright green brontosaurus as its logo, giving away inflatable sauropods to kids, putting talking cartoon dinosaurs in its TV ads, and even calling its premium gas "Dino Supreme." (Now with 15 percent more "Dino"!) Generations of American kids should be forgiven for assuming that the fossil fuels in their plastics and furnaces and gas tanks were actually made of dinosaur fossils.
But we've been burning oil for centuries—check the polar icecaps for proof—and there are still trillions of gallons left in the Earth's crust. That's over one hundred cubic miles of petroleum. There's just no way the Mesozoic dinosaurs composed enough total biomass to make that much oil. In layman's terms: dinosaurs were big, but they weren't that big.
So what is oil made from, if not bright green cartoon dinosaurs? We now believe that most oil formed in offshore continental shelves, when blooms of plankton, algae, and other simple sea life died in low-oxygen seas and were buried under layers of coastal sediment. A similar process on land produced coal, but most of our coal comes from trees and ferns buried in swamps millions of years before the first dinosaur appeared.
So most petroleum comes from prehistoric animals, yes—but boring, microscopic ones. But take heart: it's not impossible that some dinosaur remains could have washed out to sea and joined the putrefying plankton party. There may be a few tyrannosaur hydocarbons in your gas BBQ grill sometimes. You'd never know. The Earth is really good at recycling molecules, after all. Every time you breathe, you're inhaling nitrogen and oxygen from the last dying breath of the last dinosaur, and every glass of water you drink has been through a dinosaur's kidneys and cloaca many times. Refreshing!
Quick Quiz: Sinclair Oil is now headquartered in what U.S. state, whose fossil record contains more dinosaur species than any other state?
Ken Jennings is the author of eleven books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.