BANGOR – A Massachusetts minister says he will use dinosaur bones to teach creationism when he visits the Neighborhood Church on Sunday.

The Rev. Paul E. Veit, pastor of Haverhill Alliance Church in Haverhill, Mass., began collecting fossils about three years ago to enhance his teaching of creationism over evolution. Creationism is a doctrine that attributes the origin of matter and species to an act of creation by God as described in the Bible.

Veit, 40, said he has a fossilized assortment that includes a mammoth leg bone, a raptor egg and a replica of a mammoth skull.

“It was really just to illustrate some points I was making when I was teaching teenagers, and then it started getting a little bit out of control,” he told a Massachusetts newspaper this fall.

He travels frequently throughout New England to argue that dinosaur bones and eggs are well-preserved evidence that the complexity of animal physiology is more reasonably explained as the work of a great creator than the outcome of gradual, unpredictable evolution.

Veit spent the week before Christmas at a dig outside Lubbock, Texas, working alongside groups of like-minded Christians through a Christian-run museum.

The minister has a degree in divinity, but got his science background from classes in high school and college and his own independent research over the years.

He argues in his lectures that the widespread extinction shown in the fossil record suggests a sudden cataclysmic water event: Noah’s flood. Veit said that he tries to present the evidence in a manner that allows audience members to draw their own conclusions about evolution and creationism.

“The information is there, but it’s how we interpret the information that matters,” he said. “And the creationist interpretation is very logical and very scientific if you’ll take the time to really look at the evidence.”

Veit said that there are

not transitional animals

in the fossil record to

prove evolution, but if creationism is true, scientists will see complex plants and animals in the same fossil record.

“There just aren’t transitional forms of animals

going from simple to

complex, he said in a phone interview from the dig in Texas. “We don’t find fish growing arms and legs, then, walking out on land. Creationism fits best with the fossil record.”

Early this year, Veit founded a nonprofit organization called Declare God’s Wonders to deliver his ministry to more people.

His next project is raising money to buy a 6-foot-long skull of a tylosaur, the largest marine dinosaur, which he believes is the Leviathan from the Book of Job.

Veit will speak at 10:30 a.m. Sunday, Dec. 29, at the Neighborhood Church at 263 Texas Ave. in the former Dow Air Force Base chapel in Bangor. For information, call 945-9937.