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Originally and chiefly American English, the humorous colloquial expression dinosaur juice, also dead-dinosaur juice, designates petroleum, and any liquid derived from petroleum used in a vehicle powered by an internal-combustion engine.
This expression occurs, for example, in the following from When it rains, it pours… and floods, by Drew Sheneman, published in The Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey, USA) of Sunday 20th July 2025 [page D2, column 4]—the reference is to Donald John Trump (born 1946), 45th President of the USA from 2017 to 2021, 47th President of the USA from 2025:
Trump is opening up portions of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, despite the fact that no one wants to drill there. The last two oil lease auctions received zero bids because big oil companies like money and it’s way cheaper to frack the entirety of the Midwest until their drinking water is pure methane than it is to siphon dinosaur juice out of the frozen tundra.
The expression dinosaur juice is composed of:
– the noun dinosaur, designating any of the large, extinct reptiles which lived in prehistoric times;
– the noun juice, designating any liquid fuel used to run an engine.
This expression may have stemmed from popular association of the noun dinosaur with the expression fossil fuel, designating combustible material found underground in deposits formed by the decomposition of prehistoric organisms.
These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the expression dinosaur juice, also dead-dinosaur juice, that I have found:
1-: From a letter to the Editor, by one Alan Gresky, of Oak Ridge, published in The Knoxville News-Sentinel (Knoxville, Tennessee, USA) of Sunday 30th January 1977 [page C-3, column 6]:
With this cold, cold winter, the Creator called Nature is possibly trying to warn us, including those who blindly serve and worship “supernatures” or “the supernatural,” that we must soon strive to become like the higher animals—or else it will cause an extinction effect like the one that created those deep wells of dinosaur juice now flowing from the sands of Saudi Arabia, Texas, Alaska and the ocean-polluting offshore rigs.
2-: From Let he who would call up crisis… cast out the first gas-guzzler, by Russ Metz, published in The Bath County News-Outlook (Owingsville, Kentucky, USA) of Thursday 5th May 1977 [page 8, column 5]—the U.S. lawyer Ralph Nader (born 1934) is a political activist involved in consumer protection and environmentalism:
Who needs the oily Arab mafia? We will tax gas guzzlers until we get enough money for the CIA to buy an oil field of our own. Then we’ll shift the tax to the sheiks on their Cadillacs and air conditioners and teach them it isn’t nice to fool with Mother America.
We have got ways of saving dinosaur juice. Our great white feather-merchants are working on the handy-dandy highway choo-choo plan. Just as soon as they can catch Ralph Nader not looking, they will install hookups on the fronts and backs of cars like railroad cars.
All our super highways will have tow trucks 30 minutes apart going in both directions. We pull out on a super highway and wait for, say the St. Louis tow, and hook on when he comes along. Then we cut the engine, lay back and take a nap, get out the party supplies, or rap with the guys in the convertible and let the Amtrack people get us there.
3-: From a letter to the Editor, by one J. Holden, of Ukiah, published in the Ukiah Daily Journal (Ukiah, California, USA) of Sunday 15th April 1979 [page 4, column 4]:
We’re all mad as hell about pumping our labor, dollars, natural resources and sense of values into the unquenchable desert in exchange for dead dinosaur juice pumped with great difficulty into ghastly inefficient, internal-combusion [sic] poison generators.
4-: From the Detroit Free Press (Detroit, Michigan, USA) of Monday 28th May 1979 [page 1B, column 2]—this text was illustrated by m.p.g. (miles per gallon) figures for various types of motor-vehicles such as the M60 U.S.-Army tank:
Some great gas hogs
Let’s all extend our forefingers, fold our aft fingers, stretch our arms, bead our eyes, wrinkle our noses, jut our chins and open wide our mouths to shout in self-righteous indignation:
“SINNERS!”
Oh, doesn’t it feel wonderful, brothers and sisters, to know that for all the guilt heaped upon our fuel-consumptive shoulders, our cars still get better gas mileage than SOME vehicles we know. Here are some of the world’s most voracious drinkers of dead dinosaur juice.
We don’t care what you’re driving, friend; it gets better mileage than an M60 tank, and if it doesn’t, get somebody to fix the hole in the fuel line.
—Rick Ratliff
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