New museum says dinosaurs were on Noah's Ark!

This story didn't get nearly as much publicity here in North America as it did in Europe. That's because most Europeans think that American Right Wing Republicans and Fundamentalist are nuts. Coo-coo. Crazy. Bonkers. Well, you get the idea!

Guest Post By Andrea Hopkins

PETERSBURG, Ky (Reuters) - Like many modern museums, the newest U.S. tourist attraction includes some awesome exhibits -- roaring dinosaurs and a life-sized ship.

But only at the Creation Museum in Kentucky do the dinosaurs sail on the ship -- Noah's Ark, to be precise.

The Christian creators of the museum, unveiled on Saturday, hope to draw as many as half a million people each year to their state-of-the-art project. It depicts the Bible's first book, Genesis, as literal truth!

While the $27 million museum near Cincinnati has drawn snickers from media and condemnation from U.S. scientists, those who believe God created the heavens and the Earth in six days about 6,000 years ago say their views are finally being represented.

"What we've done here is to give people an opportunity to hear information that is not readily available ... to challenge them that really you can believe the Bible's history," said Ken Ham, president of the group Answers in Genesis that founded the museum.

Here exhibits show the Grand Canyon took just days to form during Noah's flood, dinosaurs coexisted with humans and had a place on Noah's Ark, and Cain married his sister to people the earth, among other Biblical wonders.

Scientists, secularists and moderate Christians have pledged to protest the museum's public opening on Monday. An airplane trailing a "Thou Shalt Not Lie" banner buzzed overhead during the museum's opening news conference.

Opponents argue that children who see the exhibits will be confused when they learn in school that the universe is 14 billion years old rather than 6,000.

"Teachers don't deserve a student coming into class saying 'Gee Mrs. Brown, I went to this fancy museum and it said you're teaching me a lie,"' Dr. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, told reporters before the museum opened.

A Gallup poll last year showed almost half of Americans believe that humans did not evolve but were created by God in their present form within the last 10,000 years.

Three of 10 Republican presidential candidates said in a recent debate that they did not believe in evolution.

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) www.God-101.com

Noah's Ark

The government of Norway revealed a project today to build a doomsday vault for the seeds of the world.

It is to be carved deep into frozen rock on an island not far from the North Pole and act like a Noah's Ark for nearly every food crop of every country.

This will safeguard the agricultural heritage of the planet in the face of increasing global environmental changes.

"The Norwegian government hopes to contribute to combating the loss of biological diversity, to reduce our vulnerability to climatic changes, and to enhance our ability to secure future food production," said Norway's minister of agriculture and food Terje Riis-Johansen.

"Every day that passes, we lose crop biodiversity," said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. For instance, of the 7,100 named varieties of apples grown in the United States in the 1800s, more than 6,800 no longer exist.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust is helping to fund the vault's operations and pay for the transport of seeds to the Arctic Isle of Svalbard.


The island was chosen for the vault in part because its ground is perpetually frozen.





Project architects also considered how to offset any potential impacts that worst-case scenarios of global warming might have on the island.

For instance, the vault is located roughly 425 feet above sea level.

This puts it well above a roughly 20-foot rise in sea level that would accompany the melting of Greenland's ice sheet, or even a 200-foot rise that would come with an unlikely total meltdown of Antarctica.

Researchers also saw the deeper the vault was, the colder it would remain. To help keep the seeds safely refrigerated, the vault will be located nearly 400 feet into the side of a mountain, ensuring that rising outside air temperatures will not influence the surrounding permafrost.

At the end of this tunnel, the project will build two chambers capable of holding a total of three million seed samples, making it the largest such seed bank in the world.

"Even climate change over the next 200 years will not significantly affect the permafrost temperature," said project manager Magnus Bredeli Tveiten, with the Norwegian government's directorate of public construction and property.

While scientists are not sure what the precise impacts of potential climate changes might be, "we certainly know it's going to have a major impact on certain growing areas and affect the diversity in the field," Fowler said. "So climate change will both pose a threat to the diversity we have, and make that diversity much more valuable."

The project's cornerstone was laid in June 2006. Construction is set to start in March 2007 and to finish in September 2007, with an official opening planned in late winter 2008.

Your "Johnny Appleseed" Scribe;
Allan W Janssen