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Well since you mention that bit about fossils making oil I will share my experience as a nature kind of guy.

All my life I’ve had a compost pile. We begin with leaves blown into a big pile at autumn’s end. Then all year we put potato peels, vegetable cuttings, egg shells....that kind of thing....and toss. By spring if tossed all year, the leaves and scraps will have turned into an aromatic dirt. This is not anything most backyard gardeners don’t already know.

After a few years of working the compost pile, I began to notice that all around the bottom of the pile, where the dirt has formed, an oily like substance began to fill the concrete pad I used to toss my pile.

It wasn’t oil, exactly, but my curious self could see that it was an oily liquid, this after a few years at the bottom of my rather smallish pile of decaying material.

Damn, there were times when one of thoe plastic bags that they use for groceries somehow got in my pile and after a few months even THAT would turn into that oil at the bottom of the pile.

Way I figure, oil is formed by many thousands, even millions, of years of the decaying earth breaking down as done of a miniscule scale as in my compost pile, the oil forms and seeps down into the earth to become pockets of....well....oil.

This ain’t rocket science but hey, I speculate and ruminate.

Yeah, all my life I heard about dead dinosaurs becoming the oil we use today but that ain’t no more true than Hillary’s going to be indicted.

I’m jus’ sayin’.

I don't think any scientist has ever said oil comes from dead dinosaurs. THAT came from the press back in the 1930's, and then the Sinclair Oil Company used it as their logo.

It is pretty much as you say--a matter of decay--of organic matter being consumed by anaerobic bacteria.

In fact, some scientist say that the amount of anaerobic bacteria in the Earth is staggering--that the total weight of them is greater than ALL the organisms--us included--on the land and in the ocean.

Some scientists have looked further into this and many believe that this ancient organic matter can be changed into oil--and is still ongoing--by this anaerobic bacteria even today!

I figure, oil is formed by many thousands, even millions, of years of the decaying earth breaking down as done of a miniscule scale as in my compost pile, the oil forms and seeps down into the earth to become pockets of....well....oil.

I believe that whole scenario happens constantly on a massive scale in the oceans. Millions of tons of plankton and fish die and fall to the bottom and tons of pressure, maybe geothermal temperature and marine anerobic organisms do their magic and create the black ooze.

One of our resident oil men explained to me why they call oil a fossil fuel: because of the marine micro-fossils they find in their drillings where they find a pocket.

Most of the known production areas are former seabeds, and many still are. Additionally, any underground caverns or porosity may allow the petroleum to travel miles to locations under dry land, forced by the tons of water pressure of the depths.

I even wrote a song about it.