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was also partially made of petroleum, which in retrospect seemed as if Sinclair Oil
was into recycling long before it was hip.
Naïvely,Iacceptedtheadage“dinosaursmakeupoil”astrueuntilafewscien-
ce classes in college—particularly those in geology—straightened me out. It turns
outthatnearlyallpetroleumisfromalgae,mostofwhichweredepositedandburied
inmarineenvironments;nodinosaurscontributedtheirbodiestotheoriginalorgan-
ic matter, and they had no role in helping to bury it, let along mature the organic
compounds sufficiently that these later became oil and gas deposits. Indeed, some
of the most prolific petroleum reservoirs in the world are filled with oil that post-
dates the end-Cretaceous extinction of dinosaurs. Given all of these revelations, I
had learned a lesson in not blindly accepting popular assumptions no matter how
much we want to believe them, and to beware of the power wielded by smart, per-
vasive advertising.
Yet it was not until I became a geologist, paleontologist, and ichnologist that
my perspective started coming back to this childhood thought and I wondered how,
in some small part, it could be justified as true. Sure, dinosaurs did not directly
contribute their remains to petroleum reserves. My mind is not going to change
on that point. Furthermore, some petroleum deposits definitely formed millions of
years after the last of the non-avian dinosaurs had left their traces. But did dino-
saurs somehow change environments globally so that algae—which did contribute
their bodily remains to oil—became more prolific in the world's oceans during the
Mesozoic Era? Did they alter their local environments so that rivers changed their
courses, which affected the locations of river deltas where many oil reservoirs are
located?Diddinosaursaffecttheevolutionofterrestrialecosystemsandtheirorgan-
icproductivitysomuchthatmarineecosystemswereimpactedbytheselandscapes,
thus affecting what happened in ocean waters, shallow and deep?
Up until now, we've learned that dinosaur ichnology applies to dinosaur trace
fossils like tracks, nests, burrows, gastroliths, toothmarks, and coprolites, ranging
in scale from two-meter-wide sauropod tracks to microscopic scratch marks on di-
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