It’s possible that you’ve already drunk water that was once inside a dinosaur
You may have heard the strange idea that the water you drink could once have been dinosaur urine. It sounds like a weird joke, but there’s a grain of truth to it. Water on the planet constantly moves in a cycle, passing through rivers, clouds, glaciers, and the bodies of living creatures. And yet, it would be wrong to assume that absolutely all of Earth’s water has already been inside every organism.
How Much Water Is on Earth
There are about 1.4 billion gigatons of water on Earth, and that includes everything. According to Live Science, this figure includes oceans, glaciers, ice caps, lakes, rivers, groundwater, and water vapor. The number is so enormous that it’s hard to comprehend.
Now imagine that all living creatures on the planet pass a certain volume of liquid through their bodies every day. If we take an estimate of roughly 0.2 gigatons of urine per day and divide all the ocean water by it, we get a curious result. To process the entire ocean would take about 7 billion days — roughly 19 million years. That’s a gigantic timeframe, but entirely realistic on the scale of Earth’s history.
Could Tap Water Have Been Inside a Dinosaur’s Body?
This is where things get really interesting. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs struck around 66 million years ago, crashing into the area of the Yucatán Peninsula and wiping all non-avian dinosaurs off the face of the Earth. Enough time has passed since then for living creatures to have processed more than one volume of the world’s ocean.
According to researchers, even counting only the period after the extinction of the dinosaurs, mammals have passed more water through their bodies during that time than the entire ocean contains. In other words, the water you drink today could indeed have once been inside a dinosaur, an ancient mammal, or another animal. This is a perfectly logical conclusion based on simple arithmetic.
How the Water Cycle Works
To understand why water travels across the planet, let’s recall the water cycle from school. The sun heats the surface of the oceans, water evaporates and rises into the atmosphere. There it gathers into clouds, falls as rain or snow, enters rivers, seeps underground, evaporates again — and so on endlessly. Along the way, some of this water enters plants and animals, and then returns once more to the general flow.
This is exactly why the same water molecules manage to end up literally everywhere over millions of years. A molecule from your glass could once have been a raindrop over an ancient forest, part of a glacier, or moisture inside some creature.
Why Water Moves Through the Cycle at Different Speeds
Water doesn’t pass through the cycle at a constant speed. Some molecules evaporate and return as rain within a matter of days, while others get stuck in place for colossal periods of time.
For example, water can be locked up as glacial ice for hundreds of thousands of years. And there are deep groundwaters that have spent tens of thousands of years underground without ever reaching the surface. While such water sleeps within the depths of a glacier or deep underground, it simply doesn’t participate in the overall movement and, naturally, doesn’t pass through any living organism.
What Is Juvenile Water in Simple Terms
And here is the main argument that leads scientists to answer negatively when asked whether all of Earth’s water has been urine. There is juvenile water, locked deep beneath the planet’s surface, that has never emerged from Earth’s interior in all of its history.
This water rises to the surface through volcanic activity, in the form of steam or lava. It is released when magma dissolves it and a volcano ejects everything into the atmosphere along with ash and rocks. Only at that moment does such water enter the water cycle for the first time and theoretically have a chance of ending up inside an animal. It turns out that right now, in volcanically active areas around the world, new water is breaking through to the surface that has never once participated in the life of the planet.
So a significant portion of Earth’s water has indeed already been inside living organisms, and your water could well have once passed through a dinosaur — the math allows for it. But claiming that absolutely all of the planet’s water has been urine is incorrect, since some water is locked in glaciers and deep geological layers for tens and hundreds of thousands of years, and juvenile water is emerging to the surface through volcanoes for the very first time.
