• CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    made from dinosaurs

    False, it’s from trees that grew, died, and fell down into piles and got buried, for millions upon millions of years, before anything on the planet evolved to eat their corpses.

    edit: Seems I was working off outdated knowledge. Apparently scientists currently believe that almost all of our oil came from microscopic aquatic life such as algae and plankton. It still ain’t dinosaur juice though!

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      That’s coal. Petroleum is from a variety of things that died in certain conditions where the carbon in their bodies was unable to escape into the short carbon cycle. It’s less dinosaurs and more Paleozoic though. That’s why you have stuff like the Permian basin

      • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Interesting. I knew how coal was formed but also thought a lot of our oil came from Carboniferous forests. After reading your comment I had to go read a few papers and articles! Apparently the consensus these days is that most of our oil came from microscopic aquatic life (diatoms, plankton, algae) that died and was buried in de-oxygenated water. The sheer amount of them that had to live and die to create these vast reservoirs of oil is mind blowing.