Shouldn't we find millions of tiny pockets of oil wherever we find a fossil? If not, it seems more likely that we would find many pools or lakes of oil on the surface rather than seeing oil travel and pool in a central location deep underground by sinking below heavier water.
With us becoming partners with Russia now and Bush being an oil man, amybe that will allow more information to be shared so we can find out more about what Russia knows and is still finding out from their basement drilling. They're #2 behind Saudi Arabia and have lots of unreleased data collected by excellent scientists.
As I understand the conventional theory, petroleum doesn't really come from dinosaurs or other animals, it comes from plant matter. Peat moss bogs and mangrove swamps are perhaps modern analogs of the material that may have become petroleum. I don't know what differing conditions led to coal or shale oil versus liquid petroleum. Obviously the material had to be buried under rock otherwise it would have decayed or burned on the surface.
Gold argues that the presence of helium in petroleum proves that petroleum seeped up from below, carrying heilum along with it. It is equally possible that the helium being emitted by the radioactive decay in rocks was absorbed by the petroleum in situ. He argues that the presence of non-hydrocarbons in petroleum is the result of bacterial action, but there is no proof for this, no experiment showing that underground bacteria can create pristane and other common substances.