[djf]

The strangest (but perhaps the best) of the theories I've heard about where all the oil came from is:


Fish. Humongous fish die offs, that get covered by silt, and then decompose to simple carboniferous chains.

Here is a site that has spectacular pictures of weird skulls:

http://www.enigmas.org/aef/lib/archeo/askulls.shtml

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

In the book THE STRUGGLE FOR GREECE by HERODOTUS he tells that at the battle of Plataea, after the Persian bodies had decomposed, they found,
"one skull with no cranial sections but was made from one bone; a jaw was picked up with all the teeth, front and back, were solid all the way through, forming one piece of bone. One of the skeletons had belonged to a man five cubits high."(slightly shorter than Goliath of Gath.