It varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but generally speaking you do own the land under your house. You (or a previous owner) can choose to sell or lease

It varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but generally speaking you do own the land under your house. You (or a previous owner) can choose to sell or lease the minerals under your house. It is so difficult to buy land without being informed of its mineral rights that it might actually be technically impossible to acquire land without knowing beforehand the status of those rights unless you specifically set out to do so as an experiment or something. Like by covering your eyes, plugging your ears, and screaming "LA LA LA LA" as you initial the page of the contract describing mineral rights. Or not actually reading the results of a title search. So you own the dirt, but people don't want dirt they want gold, oil, and other such things. The only thing the judge said was that dinosaur bones aren't "minerals". If they had found ancient pottery or buried gold coins those also aren't minerals. Yeah gold coins, even though gold is considered a "mineral" stamped coins are not for the purposes of mineral rights. If a previous owner sold the rights to the minerals in the dirt under your house, that's on you for not paying attention during the sale-- assuming you wanted the rights to begin with.