T-Rex Car Emblem: Anti-Christian Or Just Hungry?

Here are some names the idiot who patented the design of this thing has probably never heard of:

John Ray (1627 – 1705) was the first person to establish the notion of species as the basic unit of taxonomy. He was mostly interested in plants, but he studied fossils as well. He was also deeply religious.

Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778) was a pioneer in zoological nomenclature, picking up on Ray’s ideas and creating the hierarchy for classification we all use today; Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species, catalouging his specimens with a binomial latin description. He recognized that humans are closely related to apes and thought they should be placed in the same genus, but stopped short of doing so. Linneaus was also a religious man.

Georges Cuvier (1769 – 1832) was a scientist whose work was extremely useful in interpreting fossils and relating them to modern animals. He came up with a system to classify animals according to their basic body plan, which was a major advencement at the time. His extensive studies of fossils gave rise to the science of palaeontology, and he recognised that particular groups of fossil organisms were associated with certain rock strata. This last finding meant that it became possible to place the strata into order by relative age of the fossils. He was also a Bible-believing christian who felt that religious truths existed independantly of scientific and rational ones.

William Buckland (1784 – 1856) discovered and named Megalosaurus in 1824. This was the first formal description of a fossil dinosaur ever written. Buckland was also a Canon of Christ Church (the only university in the world which is also a cathedral).

Sir Richard Owen (1804 – 1892) first coined the word “dinosaur” in 1842. Even then he recognized the anatomical similarities between dinosaurs and birds, and many of his ideas formed the basis for much of our understanding of dinosaur classification to follow. He was a christian. He was also a bit of a prick too, but that’s beside the point.

Reverend William Fox (1813 – 1881) was a an English clergyman and fossil hunter who worked in the Isle of Wight. He collected more than 500 fossil specimens in his lifetime and brought them to fellow paleontologists, including the first specimens of Hypsilophodon and Polacanthus (both of which are named for him).

Edward Drinker Cope (1840 -1897) was one of the greatest of all American fossil hunters, second to his bitter rival Othniel C. Marsh. Cope published more than 1,200 papers and naming at least 1,000 species in his lifetime. That record still hasn’t been broken, and the findings of his expeditions are still being poured over. He was also religious, having been raised by parents who were Quakers.

Robert T. Bakker (1945 – ) is probably most influential and charismatic paleontologist of recent times, having helped almost single-handedly to promote the theory of warm-bloodedness in dinosaurs. His ideas about dinosaurs helped initiate the ongoing dinosaur renaissance that is currently being enjoyed around the world. He is also a Pentecostal preacher and a strong proponent of theistic evolution.

Peter Dodson (1947? – ) is a paleontologist who has done extensive field work in Canada, has named the dinosaur Avaceratops (after his wife). He is one of the leading experts on Ceratopsian dinosaurs, has written a wonderful and authorative survey of them in The Horned Dinosaurs. He is currently president of the Philadelphia Center for Religion and Science, and is evidentially a theistic evolutionist.

Mary Schwietzer (1955? – ) is a molecular paleontologist whose unorthodox approaches have allowed for our first glimpse of blood cells and soft tissue of Tyrannosaurus bones, and has recently shown molecular similarities between Tyrannosaur remains and those of chickens, thus bolstering the dinosaur-bird connection. In an interview she described herself as “a complete and total christian.”

Christians have contributed at least as much to our past and current knowledge of evolutionary biology as non-christians, especially when it comes to dinosaurs. Anyone who claims otherwise should be punched in the face.