from Hacker News

Does Oil Come from Dinosaurs?

by azizsaya on 8/8/21, 8:19 AM with 150 comments

• by dredmorbius on 8/8/21, 9:34 AM

  For a more complete answer on where oil does come from (spoiler: not dinosaurs --- TFA actually does a nice job of tying that myth to Sinclair Petroleum's advertising mascot), see Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003): https://www-legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_C... (PDF)

  The beauty of this piece is that it breaks down just how much primordeal biomass goes into producing the oil (and coal and gas) we burn today, and how much ancient time is represented in each present year of consumption. (It's millions.)

  I've submitted this numerous times to HN with little uptake, most recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27827505

• by pjerem on 8/8/21, 9:58 AM

  Ok, I’ll acknowledge for a minute the hard reality that oil doesn’t come from dinosaurs.

  Then I’ll continue to live my life like I still believe oil comes from dinosaurs.

• by jameshart on 8/8/21, 3:19 PM

  Is this actually a widespread belief held by adults? I think the first time I came across it expressed was in Airplane II - “Well, let's see: First, the Earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned into oil.” - where, like, the naïveté of the statement is the joke, right?

  So then when Pixar movies have an oil company called ‘Dinoco’ in them, I’d always assumed that’s as part of that same kind of knowing ‘obviously only a child believes oil comes from dinosaurs’ reference.

  The idea that oil could be made from dinosaurs is just.. on its face, it’s not plausible, right? It can’t be something people are actually taught. Please.

• by chrisco255 on 8/8/21, 9:04 AM

  Oil came mostly from plant matter, buried in the time of dinosaurs and prior and subjected to time and pressure. The biomass of plants exceeds the biomass of animals by as much as two orders of magnitude.

• by ptr2voidStar on 8/8/21, 4:51 PM

  The older I get (and the more time I spend on HN), the more I realise that the world is a very different place from what I (and the majority of people - it seems), have been led to believe.

• by Netcob on 8/8/21, 11:24 AM

  I heard this too and somehow just accepted it, even though I could not imagine how this should have happened. So during this major extinction event all the big dinosaurs just gathered in giant groups, fell over, then never really decomposed but got covered with something and turned into coal, oil and gas?

  Plankton is new to me too though. I thought it was plants, which could not be fully digested by anything at the time, so they just broke down a bit and formed layer after layer, until other organisms caught up and started digesting them completely - so this sort of concentrated organic matter doesn't exist in upper layers.

• by aww_dang on 8/8/21, 12:21 PM

  Biologists were surprised to discover giant tube worms living independently of photosynthesis on the deep sea floor. There's much we don't know about the Earth's ecosystems. Particularly of interest will be the possibility of intraterrestrial ecosystems, deep within the Earth.

  >"The biomass of these intraterrestrial organisms may be equal to the total weight of all marine and terrestrial plants."

  These observations may not fall in line with the current Malthusian, apocalyptic rationales. The phrase "fossil fuels" seems loaded from this perspective. Our knowledge of the natural world is constantly evolving. Making all-encompassing declarative statements might make sense in some situations, but it also makes sense to question them.

  https://academic.oup.com/femsle/article/185/1/9/485798

  http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=5412

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riftia_pachyptila

  https://phys.org/news/2019-04-rewriting-textbook-fossil-fuel...

• by albertgoeswoof on 8/8/21, 11:21 AM

  Is this a commonly held belief? I thought it was just a joke/fake news type of headline…

• by smdz on 8/8/21, 12:19 PM

  For a long time, I believed this myth - might have heard it on TV as a kid. Then one day while reading about the possibilities of intelligent life on other planets - I wondered how far we (humans) would have got technologically without oil or similar fuels, which "I thought" were a result of dead dinosaurs and a extinction level event. That is when I looked up and found the correct answer.

• by projektfu on 8/8/21, 7:18 PM

  I always thought the term fossil fuel came from Latin fossa, or ditch, trench. Coal being an exemplar.

  This probably ended up with its cognate fossil, an item, usually of historical value, dug up from a ditch. Since dinosaurs are represented by fossils, people put the two together.

• by vfclists on 8/8/21, 12:08 PM

  I believe some of the outer planets or their moons are made of methane of have loads of methane on them.

  So if without life there they have so much hydrocarbons, why then do we need to believe that our hydrocarbons come from the remains of some dead creatures, whether plankton or dinosaurs?

• by selimthegrim on 8/8/21, 10:39 AM

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoes_of_Life is highly recommended for another take on the subject.

• by simonblack on 8/8/21, 10:06 PM

  Of course it does. When was the last time you heard a squeaky dinosaur?

• by pkdpic_y9k on 8/8/21, 2:53 PM

  Just for anyone else scanning for the TLDR reminder of what I probably should have remembered from 8th grade science... Im totally going to take the author's advice and buy my kid some plastic plankton toys :^p

  > But if fossil fuel does not come from dinosaurs, then where does it come from? Plankton. That’s right. Petroleum does not originate with the Earth’s largest organisms; it begins with its smallest. Most of the biomass in any ecosystem is contained within the bodies of its humblest members, the ones way down near the base of the food chain. In the oceans, that’s phytoplankton, also known as microalgae. These microscopic organisms, mostly diatoms and dinoflagellates, are wondrously able to turn starlight into food. Through photosynthesis, they produce proteins, fats, and carbohydrates — complex carbon-based molecules. Like most tiny organisms, their generations turn over rapidly. When they expire, their minuscule bodies rain down upon the sea floor, where they form organic oozes that may be miles thick. If these biogenic deposits are buried by younger sediments, and cooked by heat and pressure in just the right way, oil and natural gas may form.

  > Taking the long view, petroleum is really a type of solar energy. That may sound nice, but it’s not innocuous. When we burn it, we take carbon from another age, sequestered by ancient plankton, and dump it into today’s atmosphere. There, it traps heat, causes global warming, and acidifies the oceans. In a sense, we’re adding the power of the ancient Mesozoic Sun to today’s Sun, and it’s overheating our planet.

  > I’m sure this won’t come as a shock, but don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. Dinosaur toys are not made from dinos, but they are made from dinoflagellates that used starlight from another era to stitch together the carbon-based molecules that today we turn into plastic. A quick search revealed that there are actually plastic plankton toys available online, plastic plankton toys made of — plankton.

• by skrebbel on 8/8/21, 12:24 PM

  There's a great XKCD "What If" about this. It answers the question "As plastic is made from oil and oil is made from dead dinosaurs, how much actual real dinosaur is there in a plastic dinosaur?"

  https://what-if.xkcd.com/101/

• by zyngaro on 8/8/21, 11:41 AM

  This is the most striking proof that fossil fuels are causing global warming I have ever read: simple energy conservation thermodynamics principal. The fossil fuels store energy from the sun of ancient times. Think of them as batteries with high energy density. Combustion releases that energy in form of carbon that prevents a proportion from the energy coming from the sun from being reflected back into space as infrared waves. Basically it’s like releasing the heat (the energy) from the sun of ancient times and preventing it from escaping into space at the same time. Basically the earth has become a pressure cooker.

• by jeandejean on 8/8/21, 2:47 PM

  Definitely a myth in English speaking countries, that's the first time I read that :-o

• by rishikeshs on 8/8/21, 1:39 PM

  Wow! I never knew this

• by airiers on 8/8/21, 9:17 AM

  Another similar myth is that the air we breathe comes from trees.

  2/3 of the air we breath also comes from plankton.

  Trees are mostly net zero in regards to oxygen. What they release during their lifetime they take back when they die and decay.

• by aaron695 on 8/8/21, 11:43 AM

  Coal does, it has plant fossils and sometimes even animals -

  https://theconversation.com/coals-formation-is-a-window-on-a...

  "A famous site at Nyrany in the Czech Republic was discovered because the director of the natural history museum there had coal delivered to heat his room. Splitting the coal sometimes yielded well-preserved fossils of early amphibians, so he could add scientifically significant specimens to his collections without leaving his office."

  I'm surprised oil is plankton, not dinosaurs/dinosaur plants as the myth goes.

• by HellDunkel on 8/8/21, 11:09 AM

  I have this silly recurring feeling that the extiction of dinosaurs and climate change of today are somehow linked. As if there is an unsolved puzzle which also provides a solution. The gigantic sizes of prehistoric living creatures is the most puzzeling.

• by bullen on 8/8/21, 11:28 AM

  Oil comes from plants, plankton might eat said algae (phytoplankton would not be sufficient) but trees on land probably contributed as much. The problem obviously is that the process from plant to coal, oil and gas takes a long time so we're inevitably going into a wall of energy deficit that will impact everything.

  Solar and wind are not solutions as plants are a solar panel and maintenance free battery in one, without any work required.

  Nuclear (1.000.000.000x higher energy density than batteries) is our only hope/despair to have any chance at preserving this way of life for 8 billion people but it requires hydrocarbons to build and maintain.

  Reduce your energy consumption as much as possible: no car, small house/appartement.

  Work on meaningful digital solutions that scale without too much energy.

  Quit everything else.