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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, 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.

  • Changes in sea level and the movement of the Earth's crust

  • sometimes force those old ocean floors to the surface,

  • which is why some oil and gas reserves are found on dry land,

  • but others are still underwater like in the Gulf of Mexico.

  • And there's one more twist to the plastic equals oil equals dinosaur story:

  • not only is oil not made from dinosaurs,

  • but plastic isn't always made from oil.

  • Frequently it's made from natural gas.

  • The main precursor to plastic is a byproduct of petroleum refining

  • called hydrocarbon gas liquids.

  • They're made of relatively light carbon compounds

  • that can be condensed out of natural gas by cooling it.

  • These compounds are used in the chemical reactions that we use to make plastic.

  • And in the United States they're the source of most of the plastic that's made.

  • So in the end, oil and natural gas come from the same place,

  • but it's not some dinosaur graveyard.

  • It's ancient ocean floors,

  • where countless billions of tiny animals, plants, and microorganisms

  • wound up, so that your kid could play with their plastic t-rex.

  • Whether you choose to explain that to them is totally up to you.

  • Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow

  • and thanks to all our patrons who keep these answers coming.

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  • Hank: ...bowling ball to the head suddenly Fred Flinstone can't remember who he is,

  • another bonk and everything goes back to normal.

  • It makes for some Pleasant cartoon hijinks, but in reality concussion induced amnesia...

Here's a fun connection that people on the internet like to make:

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B2 中高級 美國腔

由真正的恐龙制成的塑料恐龙是(Are Plastic Dinosaurs Made from Real Dinosaurs?!)

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    joey joey 發佈於 2021 年 05 月 13 日
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