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

No, your car isn’t running on liquefied dinosaurs.

At some point, you’ve probably heard the myth that oil comes from dinosaurs—as if every time you fill up at the gas station, you’re pumping refined velociraptor into your vehicle. It’s a colorful image, and one that’s managed to burrow deep into public imagination. But it’s not true.

Despite how widespread this 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,” explains geologist Reidar Müller from the University of Oslo, speaking to Science Norway. “But oil comes from trillions of tiny algae and plankton.”

Long before humans roamed the Earth—tens to hundreds of millions of years ago—algae and plankton thrived in ancient oceans. When these microscopic organisms died, they sank to the seafloor, eventually getting buried under layers of sediment. Over millions of years, subjected to intense pressure and deprived of oxygen, this organic soup was “cooked” by geological processes and transformed into crude oil.

That sticky black substance powering our world today didn’t come from ancient predators or towering reptiles—it came from ocean muck, not monsters.

As the oil formed, it slowly seeped upward through porous rock until it hit a harder, impermeable layer. Trapped beneath, it remained until humans came along to drill it out—or until a geological event cracked the rock and released it naturally.

What about marine dinosaurs or a flailing T. rex that ended up in the sea? Even if one did sink to the ocean floor, it still wouldn’t turn into oil.

Why? Because oil needs very specific conditions to form: a low-oxygen environment to prevent decay, and organic matter small enough and abundant enough to become fuel. Large creatures like dinosaurs wouldn’t last long at the ocean bottom. Scavengers and microorganisms would strip their bodies down to the bones long before they could be buried deep enough to start the transformation into oil.

So next time someone tells you oil comes from dinosaurs, you can smile and say: not quite. It comes from trillions of forgotten microscopic lives—not from the bones of giants.

And if dinosaurs really did once roam the Earth in the numbers people imagine, where are all their bones? Now that’s the next mystery to unravel.