The average American drinks four cups of water every day, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That is far short of the recommended eight glasses of water every day and is equivalent to around four cups of dinosaur pee.
Whether it is tap, filtered, bottled, sparkling or sourced from the Himalayan glaciers and sparkled with gold dust, you are just actually drinking the liquid wastes of an ancient beast, says science-centric YouTube channel Curious Minds.
A video explaining this theory says a very small percentage of all the water in the world is available for drinking purposes, but it is still a huge amount of water to provide for the needs of every human being that has ever walked on the surface of the Earth for the last 200,000 years.
Every year, around 121,000 cubic miles of water, or about the equivalent of 42 Superior Lakes, falls down on Earth and constantly flows through the rivers, lakes, ground reservoirs and everywhere else it passes through, including inside the guts of people and animals that drink it.
So what do dinosaurs have to do with all this? Unlike humans, who have been on Earth for a tiny fraction of the 186 million years that dinosaurs ruled this planet, the beasts were here far longer than we have ever been. In that long span of time, it is very likely that the dinosaurs have drunk all the water available back then, and all the water available now is simply water that has passed through a dinosaur's kidneys making its way through the never-ending water cycle.
"Humans consume a lot of water, but our species hasn't had the numbers or time to process a large portion of the Earth's water. Dinosaurs on the other hand had a long time to drink water," the video explains. "The Mesozoic era - the reign of the dinosaurs - lasted for 186 million years. That gave them time to drink a lot of water. So while most molecules in your eight-ounce glass have never been drunk by another human, almost every single molecule has been drunk by a dinosaur."
Charles Fisherman, author of "The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water," says water molecules are extremely resilient, and it's likely that all water molecules present now were the same water molecules available for billions of years.
"All the water on Earth has been through a dinosaur kidney," Fisherman tells Marketplace.org. "Every bottle of Evian you drink from is Tyrannosaurus Rex pee. All the water on Earth has been here for 4.5 billion years. It's all toilet-to-tap at some level."
Photo: Katherine Johnson | Flickr
