"And to think all this time I thought Chucky was trained for the clergy, and now I discover he was a paleontologist and a geologist. I guess I need to learn to use Google better."
Back then, there was a LOT more cross-disciplinary work going on than there is now. Chuckie may not have been a practicing paleontologist/geologist, but he knew and corresponded with men who were.
That's very nice and I'm really happy for them, but the claim was that pal'gy and geo'gy led to ToE. You'd have thought that ToE would have been invented, then, by a geologist or pal'gist. But instead we have a trained religionist, an amateur scientist at best, who took a sea cruise and then drew selectively on the work of some non-evolutionst geolgist and paleontologist friends of his -- amongst other fields -- that really led to ToE. And even then he admitted these fields didn't "yet" support his theory as well as they hopefully would in the future.
I don't think that really makes your case.
The original claim was that you can't study rocks without believing in ToE. First, ToE operates on life, and geology is not the study of life, but of the earth. Maybe you mean you can't be a YEC and a geologist?
But back to paleo, as we have seen paleontology existed without ToE, and did not lead in some inevitable manner to ToE, and yes, you can still study fossils without believing that all those abruptly appearing fossils which are staggeringly similar across the "ages" evolved.
I do think you could argue that evolutionists are much more motivated to enter the field of paleontology to try to find those missing fossils Darwin hoped to find than, say, a creationist would be, so that might explain the case of the "missing creationist paleontologists".