塑料恐龙是真的恐龙做成的吗 Are Plastic Dinosaurs Made from Real Dinosaurs

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Here's a fun connection that people on the internet like to make: plastic is made of oil, and oil is made of dinosaurs, so when you're playing with plastic dinosaur toys, you're basically playing with the remains of real dinosaurs.

It's fun to think about but it's not that simple.

For one thing, the oil and natural gas that we pump out of the ground are not the chemical leftovers of dinosaurs.

Instead, they're made from the ancient remains of a whole bunch of much smaller creatures.

The internet might want you to think that oil equals dinosaur corpses, but the fact is that the petroleum we use to make plastics actually comes from ancient ocean floors, where there weren't any dinosaurs.

But those ocean waters did and still do support a mind-bogglingly huge mass of tiny microorganisms, plants, and animals.

And not all that biomass gets eaten by bigger creatures.

Some of it dies and trickles down through the ocean as so-called marine snow, a sort of perpetual rain of organic matter that falls to the seafloor.

If enough of this material builds up faster than it decays, then you wind up with a layer of organic goo at the bottom of the ocean.

After a while, the goo can get buried under sand and other sediment and then time, pressure, and heat turn that organic layer into oil and natural gas.

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