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I’ve always wondered how it’s possible for oil to be the residue of dinosaurs if it’s a few miles under the earth’s surface. If life on earth dates back only a billion or so years, that’s not enough time to have enough sedimentary rock laid down on top of the dead organic matter to pile up several miles deep. And all oil would need to be found in sedimentary rock for that to be true.

And every time we found a deposit of fossils there should be a layer of oil.

I think coal is mainly the remains of dead organic matter, but not oil.

I’ve always wondered how it’s possible for oil to be the residue of dinosaurs if it’s a few miles under the earth’s surface.

The oil-dinosaur connection is either being used jokingly or as a strawman, no scientist actually believes that. Most oil is ancient zooplankton and algae - which is one of the reasons algae fuel is surprisingly similar to petroleum (which has any number of chemical compounds in it and not just long chains of hydrocarbons).

If life on earth dates back only a billion or so years, that’s not enough time to have enough sedimentary rock laid down on top of the dead organic matter to pile up several miles deep.

Any number of factors plays a role where the oil actually ends up, from plate tectonics to the type of rock. Still, on the grand scale the location of large oil fields correlates well with the location of ancient oceans.

I think coal is mainly the remains of dead organic matter, but not oil.

The formation of coal can almost be watched: moors turn into peat and peat slowly turns into lignite, then hard coal.

If life on earth dates back only a billion or so years, that’s not enough time to have enough sedimentary rock laid down on top of the dead organic matter to pile up several miles deep

What? Williston Basin: over 15000 ft. of sedimentary rock. Anadarko Basin: even more. That's just two instances. There's plenty of time, because it has happened.