Where the dinosaurs roam

Driving through the U.S. this winter? How about putting creationism on your itinerary? Plan a stop at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, in northern Kentucky. The 70,000-square-foot high-tech museum brings to life the pages of the Genesis and explains, according to fundamentalist tenets, how the book can answer all questions about creation.

In the privately funded facility’s exhibits, Adam and Eve live idyllically in the Garden of Eden, as children play and dinosaurs roam the nearby forests and riverbanks. (Charles Darwin, are you listening?) The serpent coils cunningly in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Large biblical murals provide a backdrop for settings.

The facility takes its inspiration from the literal interpretation of the Bible, which contends that God created the heavens and earth with all its life forms over six days about 6,000 years ago and made humans and dinosaurs contemporaries. The scientific consensus holds that earth is about 4.5 billion years old and that dinosaurs were already extinct 65.5 million years before human life.

Opened in 2007, it is the brainchild of Ken Ham, an Australian immigrant to he U.S. who started the Christian publishing company Answers in Genesis in the late 1970s.

Visitors can watch the story of creation unfold in a special-effects theatre, see how God created the heavens in a planetarium, explore a 40-foot-tall recreation of a section of Noah’s Ark and stare into the jaws of growling robotic dinosaurs.