Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, December 23, 1994 TAG: 9412230108
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CLAREMONT LENGTH: Medium
His home holds a brontosaurus bone he dug up in Wyoming, and the retired pastor-turned-amateur paleontologist has found fossils along the James River that have helped scientists trace the evolution of ancient whales.
Not that Correia believes a word of it.
Correia - a valuable front-line scout in the Smithsonian Institution's search for evolutionary truth - is a creationist who holds that God created the Earth in six days about 7,000 years ago.
``We have a slight disagreement about the age of the fossils,'' he said. ``I say they're thousands of years old, and others say they're millions.''
It's an unusual partnership between religion and science, but one that has helped scientists trace the evolution of whales in the North Atlantic Ocean, said Frank Whitmore, a retired Smithsonian Institution paleobiologist.
``What he has collected is over a time period when modern whales developed,'' Whitmore said. ``A lot of what Bob has found over the years was the basis of a paper I published earlier this year.''
Smithsonian scientists have excavated what they say is a nearly complete, 6 million-year-old whale skeleton Correia found hidden in the cliffs along the river. And Correia has found the fossil of a species of turtle there that scientists previously thought existed only in Africa.
Correia has prowled these beaches since his work as a Seventh-Day Adventist minister brought him to the area 25 years ago.
He's been a dinosaur buff since childhood in California, and has converted his garage into a fossil museum to display a brontosaurus foreleg, a cast of the only dinosaur footprint found in Virginia, a mastodon tusk and fossils from about 200 different species of marine life found in the James River.
For Correia, the beaches give him a chance to bolster his argument that a great flood wiped out the dinosaurs. He and other creationists contend God created the world and that fossils were created in the great flood. Evolutionists would look at the Claremont shoreline, say that radioactive dating would put the fossils at up to 23 million years old and argue that life evolved through natural processes.
But in a debate sometimes punctuated by bitter disagreement in classrooms and at school board meetings, Correia and Whitmore have forged friendship.
Correia is one of a half-dozen people on whom Whitmore has relied to keep checking for fossils. The Smithsonian scientist says he has visited the area several times in the last 25 years, staying with Correia and checking on finds he has made.
In fact, Whitmore encouraged Correia and his wife to settle in Surry County when they retired from a life of church work in Bermuda, the Amazon basin, Canada and across the United States.
But both men said they've never talked about the chasm between their biblical and scientific beliefs, partially out of politeness and partially because they share the same goal: preserving the fossil record.
``I have a firm belief in evolution, but we're not going to be able to change each other,'' Whitmore said. ``For gosh sakes, we evolutionists don't know all the answers either.''
by CNB