As a paleontologist, I have found that there are a few misconceptions about dinosaurs. Some of them have gone by the wayside when the research has been able to penetrate the media bombardment we face every day, while others have persisted for decades for a variety of reasons. One of these seemingly undying myths is the idea that oil comes from dinosaurs. This is an interesting idea that I believe stems from a pop culture phenomenon nearly 100 years old.

Most people have a basic understanding that oil comes from dead plants/animals/organic matter. However the misconception comes when thinking about which animals and plant remains helped create that oil. I believe a great deal of this misunderstanding comes from the Sinclair Oil symbol—a small, green, sauropod dinosaur named “Dino”. The reason for this symbol has nothing to do with where the oil is coming from, but rather has a more historical story.

Dino, the Sinclair Oil mascot trademarked in 1932, was practically ubiquitous across the United States after WWII.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, dinosaurs were big business. Museums across the eastern United States were scrambling to get the “best” skeleton and out-do other museums. They all wanted the biggest, most complete, fiercest, etc. This was the time of the infamous dinosaur wars. One of the prominent paleontologists at this time was Barnum Brown. He was the discoverer of Tyrannosaurus rex in 1902 (Osborn, 1905) and was a prolific fossil hunter. Some say he was the greatest dinosaur fossil collector ever. In the early 1900s, Brown had a relationship with the Sinclair Oil and Refining Corporation. He assisted in writing their promotional pamphlets and designing stamps in exchange for monetary support of his dinosaur collecting expeditions (Mitchell, 1998).

Images of Sinclair’s promotional and educational booklets handed out in the 1930s (Spence, 1966).

“To give better academic stature to its promotions, Sinclair financed for several years the dinosaur fossil search expeditions of Dr. Barnum Brown, then curator of fossil reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History,” (Spence, 1966).

Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History, ready to depart on a bone hunting expedition in 1934 (Spence, 1966).

To capitalize on the popularity of dinosaurs, “Dino” was created as a marketing tool aimed at getting customers to believe that better oil came from older rocks. One of their marketing signs claimed it was “mellowed 80 million years” (Spence, 1966). The public equated Dino with power, endurance, and stamina (Spence, 1966). I’m sure those were qualities that Sinclair was happy to be branded with. Although the pamphlets and stamp books made reference to how oil was formed even before the dinosaurs existed, it seems the association of Dino and oil was too difficult to separate.

Graphic depicting how oil is formed (Chernicoff, 1995).

How oil actually forms:
When plants and animals living in the world’s oceans die, they sink to the ocean floor where their remains are eventually buried by sediment. Over time, as more of this organic matter is accumulated and buried deeper and deeper, it begins to change. Once certain pressures and temperatures are reached underground, the organic material changes into a substance called kerogen. As kerogen is buried even deeper, the increasing temperature and pressure transform it into hydrocarbons – the main constituents of crude oil and gas . The hydrocarbons will migrate through the pore spaces in rocks and accumulate in natural traps and pool together. It is these traps and pools that oil companies are searching for when they drill oil wells. It was this same process that occurred in North Dakota and formed the Bakken crude being drilled today (Nordeng, 2014).

Chernicoff, S., 1995, Geology, Worth Publishers, Inc., 593 pp.
Mitchell, W. J. T., 1998, The last dinosaur book, The University of Chicago Press, 321 pp.
Nordeng, S. H., 2014, Building the science for advancing oil and gas exploration and development in the Williston Basin: Geo News, v. 41, no. 1, p. 14-18.
Osborn, H. F., 1905, Tyrannosaurus and other Cretaceous carnivorous dinosaurs: American Museum of Natural History, Bulletin 21, p. 259-265.
Spence, H., 1966, A Great Name in Oil, Sinclair Through Fifty Years, F. W. Dodge Co. / McGraw Hill Inc., 104 pp.

Have you ever thought about how the many dinosaurs on exhibit in museums across the country got there? What is the journey taken from the time the animal dies until it goes on display? Do all animals become fossils? If the path to becoming a fossil begins at the moment of death, then every plant and animal must run a gauntlet of forces, any of which can stop the process of fossilization.

Picture a Triceratops during its last day on Earth. After giving up the ghost (so to speak), a plethora of forces will begin attacking the future fossil.

First, the Triceratops might be exposed to animals that would like to make a meal out of its remains. This would include scavengers spreading the remains across a large area, wind and rain eroding away the remains, or even small insects and bacteria eating away at the bones. Ultimately, the remains need to be buried quickly, ushering them away from all these potential hazards.

Next, the remains must stay buried for thousands to millions of years. The main forces to avoid during this period are geological. The bones/fossils must survive all the geological forces that could potentially destroy them. These include mountain building, volcanoes, earthquakes, erosion, and landslides (to name only a few).

So is that it? Now that the bones have become fossils, they just wind up in the museum for us to enjoy, right? Not quite.

Now it is time for the remains to come to the surface. This step is really about timing. The fossils must be exposed on the surface and be discovered. Sounds easy enough right? Well, there is a catch. Not only do they need to be visible but they need to be visible to someone who recognizes them for what they are…fossils.

Visual representation of the fossilization process

Did dinosaurs recognize the fossils being exposed at their feet during their time walking the planet? Would you be able to recognize a fossil in the ground if you saw one? More to the point, would you be able to recognize a small part of an exposed fossil in the ground? Often, when fossils are discovered, only a fraction of the bone is exposed, while the rest is still buried under the surface. The fossils must be collected before the elements have had a chance to erode them away. How many fossils of ancient animals simply disappeared because they were exposed at the surface at the wrong time? How many fossils of shells, fish, or ancient reptiles did the dinosaurs destroy because they were walking on them?

Lastly, if you found the partially exposed fossil and recognized it for what it was, could you get it out of the ground intact? Someone could find the most beautiful or significant fossil ever discovered, but if they can’t get it out of the ground without it breaking into dozens or more pieces, they have only a useless pile of fragments-- not something that could go on display at a museum.

The final leg of the journey is entirely reliant on humans. The collected fossils now must travel safely back to a lab or museum, be removed from the remaining rock/dirt matrix, and still be in good enough shape to go into an exhibit. This often means not only the quality of the fossil must be good, but the fossil must also fit into the theme of the exhibit.

The dinosaur exhibit at the ND Heritage Center State Museum

The next time you walk through a fossil exhibit, I hope you remember that all the fossils you see on exhibit traveled this path. Do you ever think about what we are leaving future humans to discover about us?

When most people think of finding fossils, I bet the image that is conjured in their heads is a lone paleontologist wandering through the badlands, stopping once in a while to examine a fragment of rock or bone. Admittedly this is true in most cases. Some of the techniques used to find and collect fossils in the field are over 100 years old and have changed very little. However, with the advent of new technology comes the testing of new techniques.

Finding a large fossil is one thing. Finding a large fossil and being able to see it from space; well, that is something else entirely. A few years ago a visitor came to the North Dakota Heritage Center with tales of a fossil tree so large you could see it with Google Earth. I will admit that at first I was doubtful, but after very quickly navigating to the location on the computer and seeing photos he had taken from the ground, it did indeed turn out to be a fossil tree.

Image captured from Google Earth. The object in the yellow circle is a fossil tree trunk measuring over 100 feet long.

After some quick calculations, we determined the tree to be well over 100 ft. in length. It is broken along its length into 4-6 foot chunks, some of them likely weighing several hundred pounds each.

I study small mammals. Some of the mammals I study are classified as microfossils (fossils smaller than about 1 cm). Some of these microfossil teeth can be less than 1 mm in length!

One fossil tooth from the Brule Formation of North Dakota. This image was captured with a microscope camera. The scale bar represents one millimeter in length.

As you can imagine, finding fossils that small is no easy task. Finding these microfossils starts with a process called screenwashing. This process involves washing collected rock and dirt through wooden boxes with brass screen making up the bottom of the box. The screen openings are smaller than the openings found on most window screens. What remains on the screen after the washing process is dried. Normally it is at this point that the dried material would be picked under a microscope looking for fossils. However, we have added an additional step to the process. Some fossils from certain rock formations will glow under the application of ultraviolet light. The Oligocene age Brule Formation found in North Dakota is one such rock layer. The fossil bone from the Brule Formation glows a bright white, and the teeth from the Brule Formation actually glow a bright orange. Fortunately nothing else found in this formation reacts to the ultraviolet light, just the fossils. This makes finding microfossils from the Brule Formation very easy. Before the washed and dried material is picked under a microscope using white light, we spread the material out on a dark surface and use ultraviolet flashlights to find the teeth.

Washed and dried Brule Formation matrix spread out and ready for picking. The left image was captured under normal, white light. The right image is the exact same spot, under ultraviolet light. Note the brightly glowing tooth in the right image. Can you spot that same tooth in the left image?

This works amazingly well. We have recovered several dozen microfossil teeth using this technique.

Crowdfunding is a not a new concept. This practice has become more popular lately since the advent of the internet and social media but has been around in various forms for centuries. The idea is to fund a project with small donations from a large number of people, rather than fund it from large donations from a small number of people. The concept is used to raise money for virtually any product or idea that can garner support, including scientific research.

Mosasaur skeletons within the North Dakota State Fossil Collection.

Recently the North Dakota Geological Survey has partnered with a researcher from Texas to study the mosasaurs in the North Dakota State Fossil Collection. Mosasaurs are not dinosaurs but a type of swimming reptile closely related to the Komodo Dragon found in Indonesia today. Mosasaurs lived at the same time as dinosaurs, ruling the oceans while dinosaurs ruled the land. The mosasaur specimens found in the ND State Fossil Collection are all from rocks called the Pierre Formation and are approximately 80 million years old. These rocks were deposited in North Dakota at a time when a shallow sea called the Western Interior Seaway connected the Gulf of Mexico to the Hudson Bay. Currently there are six partial skeletons of mosasaurs in the ND State Fossil Collection and some other unassociated fragments of bones. Study of these specimens would help shed light on the kinds of mosasaurs living in ND at this time as well as putting North Dakota’s underwater world into a more regional context. Our paleontologists with the North Dakota Geological Survey are not specialists with these types of animals, so outsourcing the research is the best way to get the work accomplished.

We hope that you are as excited as we are to learn what the mosasaurs in our collection have to tell us. When this crowdfunded study is complete, we plan to share that information with you through an online open-access journal and our website. Stay tuned!

What happens to the objects in a museum’s collections if it closes? What happens to a private collection if the owner passes away, no longer wants to keep it, or no longer has the ability to care for it? The objects/collections within these examples are sometimes called orphaned collections. The size of these collections can vary from a small handful of specimens to upwards of thousands or even millions of specimens.

Before a museum agrees to add an orphaned collection into an existing collection, it is important to make sure the incoming objects fit within the mission of the collection. For example, the ND State Fossil Collection would not accept a large collection of baseball cards, no matter how valuable they may be. Baseball cards simply do not fit within the mission of the State Fossil Collection, but might be more appropriate if donated to a collection of historic objects. However, accepting a large collection of fossils from a relatively unknown locality in Bowman County, ND, is well within the mission. It is also important to decide whether this museum is the best home for the collection, as well as whether the museum has the capacity and know-how to care for the objects properly.

In 2015 the ND State Fossil Collection incorporated two large, orphaned collections. Both collections were comprised of fossil specimens collected within or very near to North Dakota, and both will shed light on faunas or individual species (or both) that are poorly represented or unknown from our state.

One collection is comprised of thousands of specimens of the dinosaur Edmontosaurus (small elephant size) collected from a single locality in the Hell Creek Formation along the very northern portion of South Dakota.

A small portion of our recently acquired collection of Edmontosaurus fossils. One pallet holds between 5 and 10 specimens in a roughly 4 ft. by 4 ft. area.

The site was comprised of multiple individuals of this one species of dinosaur, likely killed in a single cataclysmic event such as a flood or landslide. Virtually every bone in this dinosaur’s skeleton is represented in this collection, and the preservation of the bone is exquisite. Becky Barnes mentions working on/with this locality in her blog post.

The second collection is a large accumulation ( > 5,000 specimens) of mostly small animals (mouse size) from the Eocene epoch (35-55 million years ago) in Bowman County, ND.

A small portion of our recently acquired collection of Eocene fossils. One drawer (shown) holds between 350 and 450 specimens in a roughly 2 ft. by 3 ft. area.

This collection, also from a single locality, is by far the most diverse Eocene locality known in North Dakota and one of the best from this age in the world. A few papers have already been published on this locality giving detailed information about the small reptiles and a few groups of small mammals. However, there is much more to be done including work on bats, rabbits, dogs, horses, and deer to name only a few.

Both of these collections were tremendous additions to the North Dakota State Fossil Collection. We are working diligently to share the new discoveries within. Please stay tuned...

Earlier this year while doing some routine collections work we ran across a very small, nearly microscopic fossil. After a bit of research we identified it as a fragment of jaw from an early bat (NDGS 1691).

Image of NDGS 1691, right upper jaw (maxilla) with four teeth (P4-M3) of a fossil bat.

Due to the nature of powered flight, bats are pretty fragile animals. One needs to be relatively lightweight to be a successful flier, therefore most bats are relatively small and delicate creatures. As you can imagine, animals that are fragile and airborne have a relatively low chance of fossilizing. Adding to this, bats also tend to live and roost in caves and trees which are areas that are not very conducive for fossilization. Due to these factors, fossil bats are pretty rare, so this was a pretty cool discovery.

What makes this discovery even more exciting is the information about how old the bat was. The fossil record of bats contains many large gaps where no known fossils have been recovered. Some of these gaps might be as few as four million years or as many as 15 million years. Considering that for most fossil animals we have a nearly continuous record of evolution from its first appearance to its extinction or to modern times, these are large gaps. Some paleontologists argue that the fossil record of bats is the least known of all fossil animals. Using a system called biostratigraphy, we identified the associated animals found with the bat fossil and determined that this bat fossil was approximately 33 million years old. This age happens to be right in the middle of one of those large gaps where only one other bat fossil is known. That specimen, located at another museum, has since been lost to science, so this specimen is now the only existing bat fossil from this time period. We filled in a large hole in the fossil record of bats! Some might say a missing link had been found.

This bat will most likely be a new species of animal previously unknown to science. It helps us to understand the early evolution of bats and will be studied for years to come. The two other North Dakota Geological Survey paleontologists and I visit the site where this fossil was found every summer and hope to find more. This locality is one of our more productive sites. Who knows, maybe next summer we will find another bat or some other animal to fill in another gap.