ABSTRACT
On the nave wall of the church in the village where I was born, Higher Bebington in the North-west of England, just across the River Mersey from Liverpool, there was a fossil footprint of an early reptile, Chirotherium. Shaped like a hand, and hence its name, ‘hand mammal’, it came from the adjacent, Storeton, desert-derived exposures of the Triassic New Red Sandstone, laid down 225 millions of years ago, and discovered by quarrymen in 1838. A bored and occasional member of the congregation, and sitting as a child through the tedium of liturgical theatre, I would seek relief by studying this wondrous relic of a bygone age of giants. How, I now wonder, did those early church fathers – or even mothers? – reconcile the likely geological antiquity of the fossil with ecclesiastical teaching of a recent creation? Or was it just further evidence of Noah’s flood in England’s green and pleasant land? Or can we see it as a metaphor for a rapprochement between science and religion?
