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

Paul,
To answer your questions.The fish scales were down between
three and four thousand feet.However oil shale can be found
near and, I believe, on the surface.  We know tar sands are, and
in CA the Le Bria (spelling?) tar pits are an example.  Oil was
discovered, in PA, while drilling a water well.
For years, they thought that you had to have coal associated
with oil finds.A lot of it probably is.But it isn't always
true.The La Duek(spelling?) field in Alberta,Canada, is one
of the exceptions.If you can find the history of it, it is
very interesting.  I saw an oil CO. movie of it years ago.The
oil is entrained in a REEF, comprised of Dolamite (a close
relative of limestone) only two or three thousand feet down.
The D. is very vugular (passages like worm holes) in it, and
that is what contains the oil.  In that particular field, the
oil was pure gasoline (it did not require refining) and under
about ten thousand psi.  When the discovery well blew out it
sent a ten inch dia. column of oil over two hundred feet into
the air. It caught fire (an accident) and took over a year  to
get it under control.  That field produced for many years.


Gene