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Old 09-16-2013, 03:12 PM   #198 (permalink)
racprops
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jamesqf View Post
More than a little :-)



First, I don't believe anyone with even a pretense of knowledge thinks that oil & tar are really the remains of dinosaurs. But just for fun, and as an exercise in math, let's imagine that's really where oil comes from. So, basic fact: the first dinosaurs evolved about 230 million years ago, and became extinct 65 million years ago, so that's about 165 million years of dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs came in a range of sizes, but let's take the American buffalo as a good approximation. They weigh about 1 ton, live about 40 years, and in pre-Columbian times there were about 100 million in North America. So that means that each year, North America produced 2.5 million tons of buffalo. Worldwide that's 10 million tons/year (completely neglecting the oceans). So there's a potential 1,650,000,000,000,000 tons of just buffalo.

But of course oil doesn't come from dinosaurs, it's mostly from plant life (algae & plankton), and like coal, much of it formed in the even earlier Carboniferous Period. In the case of coal, we know this is true, because sometimes entire fossilized forests are found in coal deposits: Springfield Coal Fossil Forest Is Largest Ever Discovered (PHOTOS)



You think any of the rest of us have research grants? (Well, at least not for this.) We're just working off general knowledge, such as anyone should have gotten starting in elementary school. As for fact checking, ever heard of Google?
I will only say one thing.

Do you treat you friends like this?

I did know this was a test and I would be scored on it.

Rich