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Who owns the sneaky-smart feathered dinosaur Velociraptor, who starred in the “Jurassic Park” movies? Swivel-eyed atheistic Scripture-Bashers? No, emphatically no. Velociraptor belongs to 1 billion Roman Catholics. So does Neanderthal Man. So do the Paleolithic cave paintings. So do Hox genes. They all belong to…..

The Pope and his congregation. No kidding.

Most early fossil hunters were Protestants. The outstanding exception was the brilliant Geoffroy St. Hilaire of Paris, Egyptian explorer, embryologist, genetic theorist and Roman Catholic. In the 1830’s and ‘40’s, Geoffroy dug beautiful Jurassic sea-crocodiles, armor-backed beasts with long snouts studded with curved teeth that interlocked when the jaws slammed shut.

Geoff’s crocs were part of the marvelous menagerie that haunted the warm Jurassic oceans covering much of Europe. Not a single modern-day species was found among the thousands of Jurassic bones. Geoff scrutinized his croc heads and bodies and made an outrageous suggestion: “My Jurassic species evolved….they changed into modern crocodile species.”

Protestant buddies cringed. Doctrine taught that each fossil species was created by itself and went extinct without descendants.

But Geoff had powerful facts.
1) Jurassic crocs had primitive backbones. Modern crocs have ball-in-socket joints that let them perform the “death roll”, turning over and over in the water to rip apart prey carcasses. (See any episode of “The Crocodile Hunter” on cable TV.) Jurassic crocs didn’t have ball-in-socket joints, so they couldn’t roll.
2) Jurassic crocs had primitive muzzles. A modern croc has nifty bone tubes running from nostril to throat, to protect the air passage, so the beast can open its mouth and not flood its windpipe. Jurassic crocs had shorter, less developed air tubes, so underwater activity was limited.

After the Jurassic, in the Late Cretaceous Period, crocs did acquire the modern-style joints and full air tube and kept them to this day.

Then Geoff made another anatomical observation that rocked Europe: “Jurassic crocs evolved into other species too – they became possums and monkeys and………….
Us humans!!!!!!!”

Geoff’s fellow croc digger, Rev. William Buckland, giggled. “Hey – I love crocs as much as anyone…but I’m not going to greet one with “Hello Uncle, how’s it going?”

But Geoff had intriguing clues. Jurassic croc air tubes did look like what possum-style mammals had. And the way the brain-case bones were attached to the roof of the mouth had a mammal character too.

Geoff suspected that any animal Phylum could be transformed into another. Maybe a vertebrate could be made into a crustacean - by changing how the embryo grew. He mapped embryonic anatomy to see if simple shifts would transform a lobster into a poodle.

His colleagues didn’t get it. They fell over laughing…”..a lobpoodle…a poodobster…ha ha!”

However, Geoff was 150 years ahead of his time. In the 1980’s we learned about Hox genes, genetic commands that tell the body how to grow front-to-back and top-to-bottom. By gum, Geoff was right! A poodle IS an upside down lobster in the way spinal cord, gut and main artery were designed. A simple fish-like vertebrate could be made from a crustacean.

Was Geoff anti-Church? No way. During anti-clerical riots, he risked his life to rescue his old prof’s from Catholic college buildings.

In the 1850’s, Protestant Sir Richard Owen (fellow who coined “Dinosauria”) followed up the croc-to-man connection. Owen got skulls from the Permian, long before the dinosaurs. The heads had the beginnings of air tubes and lots of other mammal hints too. They weren’t crocs but a group we now call “Mammal-Like Reptiles”. Texas fossils dug in the 1870’s were even older and more primitive and showed the beginning of mammal-like features.

By 1910, a long sequence of fossils validated Geoff’s reptile-to-mammal vision (check out the fossil museum at Austin or Chicago or Harvard).

Meanwhile, Roman Catholics pursued Darwinism big-time. St. George Mivart, English anatomist, investigated all primates, from apes to little bug-eyed tarsiers. Mivart irritated loud agnostic T. H. Huxley by insisting that evolution fulfilled God’s Plan.

Pope Leo XIII was impressed – and told his theologians to look into Darwin.

In the early 1900’s, French and Spanish Catholics, including monks and priests, explored caves with Neanderthal bones and stone tools. And cave paintings by modern human species. Other Catholic priests dug dinosaurs – including kin of Velociraptor.

By the 1950’s Pope Pius XII said that evolution of some sort probably did happen. Our late John Paul II fully accepted Natural Selection as the agent that formed the human body (not the soul).

A few anti-Darwinists insi