As anyone who stayed awake during elementary school science class knows, oil comes from dinosaurs. I remember as a kid (calm down, folks; there will be no Brady Bunch references this week) seeing some kind of 'public service' spot explaining how dinosaurs "gave their all" so that we could one day have oil. It seemed a reasonable enough idea at the time -- from the perspective of an eight-year-old. But if, as an adult, you really stop to give it some thought, doesn't the idea seem a little, uhmm ... what's the word I'm looking for here? ... oh yeah, I remember now ... preposterous?

How could dinosaurs have possibly created the planet's vast oil fields? Did millions, or even billions, of them die at the very same time and at the very same place? Were there dinosaur Jonestowns on a grand scale occurring at locations all across the planet? And how did they all get buried so quickly? Because if they weren't buried right away, wouldn't they have just decomposed and/or been consumed by scavengers? And how much oil can you really squeeze from a pile of parched dinosaur skeletons?

Maybe there was some type of cataclysmic event that caused the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs and also buried them -- like the impact of an asteroid or a comet. But even so, you wouldn't think that all the dinosaurs would have been huddled together waiting to become oil fields. And besides, scientists are now backing away from the mass extinction theory.(http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-extinction6mar06,1,3634810.story )

The Wall Street Journal article previously cited noted that it "would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs to account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil in the [Middle East]." I don't know what the precise dinosaur-carcass-to-barrel-of-oil conversion rate is, but it does seem like it would take a hell of a lot of dead dinosaurs. Even if we generously allow that a single dinosaur could yield 5 barrels of oil (an absurd notion, but let's play along for now), more than 130 billion dinosaurs would have had to be simultaneously entombed in just one small region of the world. But were there really hundreds of billions of dinosaurs roaming the earth? If so, then one wonders why there is all this talk now of overpopulation and scarce resources, when all we are currently dealing with is a few billion humans populating the same earth.

And why the Middle East? Was that region some kind of Mecca for dinosaurs? Was it the climate, or the lack of water and vegetation, that drew them there? Of course, the region could have been much different in prehistoric times. Maybe it was like the Great Valley in the Land Before Time movies. Or maybe the dinosaurs had to cross the Middle East to get to the Great Valley, but they never made it, because they got bogged down in the desert and ultimately became (through, I'm guessing here, some alchemical process) cans of 10W-40 motor oil.

Another version of the 'fossil fuel' story holds that microscopic animal carcasses and other biological matter gathered on the world's sea floors, with that organic matter then being covered over with sediment over the course of millions of years. You would think, however, that any biological matter would decompose long before being covered over by sediment. But I guess not. And I guess there were no bottom-feeders in those days to clear the ocean floors of organic debris. Fair enough. But I still don't understand how those massive piles of biological debris, some consisting of hundreds of billions of tons of matter, could have just suddenly appeared, so that they could then sit, undisturbed, for millions of years as they were covered over with sediment. I can understand how biological detritus could accumulate over time, mixed in with the sediment, but that wouldn't really create the conditions for the generation of vast reservoirs of crude oil. So I guess I must be missing something here.

The notion that oil is a 'fossil fuel' was first proposed by Russian scholar Mikhailo Lomonosov in 1757. Lomonosov's rudimentary hypothesis, based on the limited base of scientific knowledge that existed at the time, and on his own simple observations, was that "Rock oil originates as tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which, under the influence of increased temperature and pressure acting during an unimaginably long period of time, transform into rock oil."

Two and a half centuries later, Lomonosov's theory remains as it was in 1757 -- an unproved, and almost entirely speculative, hypothesis. Returning once again to the Wall Street Journal, we find that, "Although the world has been drilling for oil for generations, little is known about the nature of the resource or the underground activities that led to its creation." A paragraph in the Encyclopedia Britannica concerning the origins of oil ends thusly: "In spite of the great amount of scientific research ... there remain many unresolved questions regarding its origins."

Does that not seem a little odd? We are talking here, after all, about a resource that, by all accounts, plays a crucial role in a vast array of human endeavors (by one published account, petroleum is a raw ingredient in some 70,000 manufactured products, including medicines, synthetic fabrics, fertilizers, paints and varnishes, acrylics, plastics, and cosmetics). By many accounts, the very survival of the human race is entirely dependent on the availability of petroleum. And yet we know almost nothing about this most life-sustaining of the earth's resources. And even though, by some shrill accounts, the well is about to run dry, no one seems to be overly concerned with understanding the nature and origins of so-called 'fossil fuels.' We are, rather, content with continuing to embrace an unproved 18th century theory that, if subjected to any sort of logical analysis, seems ludicrous.