Your Car Doesn’t Run on Dinosaurs.

It runs on ancient sea slime and Earth’s death coffee.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but oil isn’t made from dinosaurs. It never was.

It never will be. That’s not how any of this works.

Somewhere along the way (probably in the same classroom where they showed you how to “just say no” and told you Pluto was a planet) someone tossed out the idea that a car runs on liquified T. rex. That when you fill up your tank, you're basically cremating a stegosaurus. And for some reason, that nonsense stuck. It stuck hard.

I’ve got bad news for your childhood: oil doesn’t come from dinosaurs. It comes from plankton and algae. Microscopic sea junk. Ancient goop.

Stuff that died in oceans hundreds of millions of years ago, sank to the bottom, and got slowly buried by mud and pressure over eons. That’s what became crude oil.

Not a pile of brontosaur bones.

Want proof? We’ve never found dino DNA in oil. We have found biomarkers ( think, chemical fingerprints) from single-celled marine organisms. The receipts are in. This isn't up for debate unless you're also in one of the "birds aren't real" or "the Earth is flat" camps.

The idea that dinosaurs turned into oil is the scientific equivalent of thinking your phone works because of magic gnomes. I mean it’s catchy and simple. Sounds good in theory, but once you add a Flintstones visual, suddenly we’ve got generations of adults talking about burning dead lizards in their F-150s.

It’s not just wrong — it’s lazy thinking.

But let’s not stop at oil. Natural gas gets dragged into this idiot narrative too. So let’s clear that up while we’re at it.

Natural gas is hydrocarbons. Just molecules made up of hydrogen and carbon. Specifically, methane (CH₄), ethane, propane... all that stuff. It's not dinosaur farts. It’s chemistry. It’s geology. It’s what happens when marine gunk is buried, cooked, and compressed under the right conditions.

Same process. Same sludge. Same ocean-floor death stew.

Over millions of years, those layers of organic material get transformed — thanks to time, heat, and crushing pressure — into oil and gas. Some of it gets trapped underground. Some of it seeps up and bubbles out. And humans, being the clever little apes that we are, figured out how to stick a pipe in the dirt and light it on fire.

But here's where it gets even more fun: the Earth is still making this stuff. Right now.

Not fast. Not in human time. But it’s happening. In deep ocean trenches and sediment layers, microbes are quietly building up the next batch of future fossil fuels while we argue about plastic straws on Twitter.

And there’s even a theory (admittedly, one that isn’t totally settled but worth mentioning) that says some hydrocarbons might be abiotic. Meaning the Earth might be able to make oil and gas without the need for dead life at all. Just pressure, heat, and a big enough underground chemistry set.

Which means... it might not even be “fossil” fuel in the way we usually think of it.

Wild, right? (It's interesting stuff... look it up.)

Now, does that mean oil is renewable? Hell no. Not for us. We’re burning through it like a trust fund kid with daddy’s AmEx. What took millions of years to form, we torch in minutes. But just because it’s finite doesn’t mean it came from a dinosaur burial ground.

Oil and gas are the Earth’s death coffee. Brewed over eons. Served hot, flammable, and full of ancient sea slime. It’s beautiful in a weird, planetary-autonomy kind of way.

So please — for the love of basic science and my rapidly thinning patience — stop saying oil comes from dinosaurs. It doesn’t. It never did.

Your car doesn’t run on Jurassic leftovers. It runs on the decomposed sludge of forgotten sea microbes, compressed under a billion tons of rock, marinated in heat, and served by the geological equivalent of a French press.

The Earth made it. Not the Flintstones.

And if anyone still insists otherwise, just look them in the eye and say, “No, Calvin. It’s pond scum and pressure. Read something once in a while!”