Creation Museum in Eastern Montana

Biblical History Exhibit, Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum (Photo: GDFM)

From Helena’s Independent Record (23 October 2009):

Glendive dinosaur museum presents fossils in a biblical context

By DONNA HEALY Billings Gazette

GLENDIVE – The head and monstrous jaws of a tyrannosaurus rex sculpture poke through the outer wall of the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum.

Inside, life-size castings of dinosaur skeletons offer the polished look of a big-city science museum. But a quote from Genesis clues in visitors that the 20,000-square-foot building, which opened in Glendive this summer, is not your standard natural-history museum.

Instead, the museum, located in an area of Montana known for world-class dinosaur fossils, offers a literal, biblical account of creation.

Spotlighted on the main floor, an 18-foot-tall replica of a T. rex skeleton engages in battle with a meat-eating dinosaur ridged by spines.

The new facility is the second-largest dinosaur museum in the state, dwarfed only by the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman.

“We are totally different from the Museum of the Rockies in that we present fossils and all the exhibits in the context of biblical creation,” said Otis E. Kline Jr., the museum’s founder and director.

Jack Horner, the curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies, agrees the two museums are fundamentally different.

“It’s not a science museum at all,” Horner said. “It’s not a pseudo-science museum. It’s just not science. There’s nothing scientific about it.”

The Glendive museum’s self-guided tour starts with a series of questions challenging established science on the origins of life.

One of those questions asks whether dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago or coexisted with humans. Although the idea flies in the face of the consensus of scientific thought, it may hold sway with the one-third of adult Americans estimated by Gallup polls to believe the Bible is the actual word of God and should be taken literally.

Continue reading this article here.

It’s a shame that the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum (read Creation Museum) exists in a state that has the Museum of the Rockies. So, it seems, creationism has a hold in Montana from its western region (remember the intelligent design fiasco in Darby?), in Bozeman (the Center of Discovery and Creationism Conference 2010), to its eastern border in Glendive.

The NCSE has a list of evolution/creation issues in Montana.