For what it is worth:
 Early in my life I spent ten years in oil exploration.   I sat on many oil
 wells in the Uinta Basin of Utah.   On every hole we retorted the oil
 shale
 of every ten feet in depth.  I have a piece of core with fish scales in
 it,
 about three million years old.   The geologist identified them as shark
 scales.   To me they look more like scales from a snake.

 Anyway, being interested in oil (it was a very exciting life) I have more
 or
 less followed it.   In my humble opinion, for whatever it is worth, I
 believe much of it was done by bacteria.  Oil has been produced that way
 but
 not economically, it takes a long time, but what is a couple of million
 years in the life of the earth.

 Food for thought:  In the sea vents bacteria, live off of Hydrogen
 Sulfide -
 Very poisonous.   In  leaching piles of gold ore, utilizing Cyanide for
 leaching.  and in Modesto,CA The water supply contains bacteria that lives
 on Silicon Dioxide (sand).  It is problematic to the people that live
 there
 but it is kept a secrete from them.  So they don't complain.

 Gene Sandburg

 How far down were those fish scales?
 Why were all those dinosaurs up there on the north slope? Surely there
 was no food.

 Paul Lamar
   --

 Paul,

 Surely you jest:)  Pole shifts and migration of landmasses.  Used to be a
 lush vegetation up at North slope.

 Doug in Japan

 Not jesting.
 I doubt that. The axis of the earth would need to shift 90 degrees in the
 age of the dinosaurs. The physics of that becomes mind boggling. Try
 turning
 a spinning gyroscope 90 degrees. The current pole would be the tropics and
 the current
 equator would be the pole. If that was the case then why do we find lots
 of oil
 near the equator and in the artic? Frankly I think the dead dinosaurs
 theory is wrong
 since it was formulated in 1757 long before they discovered oil a mile
 down or more and
 all over the globe. The dead dinosaurs theory has been repeated so many
 times
 in so many books it has become gospel. Up until the Russians questioned
 the
 theory in the 1950s did anybody challenged it.

 A parallel between the way diamonds are formed and oil is formed has been
 suggested.

 Paul Lamar
-----------------------------------------------
Paul,
the magnetic field of the earth has shifted ~180* many times, recorded in
the solidified rock in the mid-Atlantic trench. As the crust spreads, molten
rock oozes out into the trench and solidifies, locking in the local magnetic
orientation.  They have measure this, and is shifts periodically on a
geologic scale.

Google Pangea Maps to see where the continents were at one time. Current
locations are only temporary.

A Cornell University professor named Gold gave a talk years ago, in which he
claimed that much of the natural gas (methane) is primordial in nature,
being formed in the formation of the solar system, and that if you drilled
down BELOW where you would expect to see pore volume due to pressure that
you would find increased pore volume and gas inclusion. Basically the rock
above would support the weight and allow pore volume to increase again.

His contention was that continental drift is powered by primordial methane
reducing iron oxide, causing iron to sink towards the core, dragging with it
rock and other plastic material. These convection currents drag along on the
crust, and cause the continents to move.
Bill Schertz
KIS Cruiser #4045
N343BS

Just the magnetic field or the axis? How does the continental drift correlate
with the rise and fall of dinosaurs time wise? In other words what did the earth
look like when the dinosaurs died?

Paul Lamar