Jurassic Park: Under New Management

I was planning to blog this L.A. Times story a couple weeks ago, and then Katrina hit and New Orleans sank and we all got a little distracted…anyway, the upshot is that creationists are buying up roadside dinosaur parks and adjusting them to fit their worldview.

From the article:

Dinny's new owners, pointing to the Book of Genesis, contend that most dinosaurs arrived on Earth the same day as Adam and Eve, some 6,000 years ago, and later marched two by two onto Noah's Ark. The gift shop at the attraction, called the Cabazon Dinosaurs, sells toy dinosaurs whose labels warn, "Don't swallow it! The fossil record does not support evolution."…

"We're putting evolutionists on notice: We're taking the dinosaurs back," said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, a Christian group building a $25-million creationist museum in Petersburg, Ky., that's already overrun with model sauropods and velociraptors.

"They're used to teach people that there's no God, and they're used to brainwash people," he said. "Evolutionists get very upset when we use dinosaurs. That's their star."

Three reasons why this is actually a good thing:

1. Roadside attractions should be weird.
2. Better a private park than a public school.
3. It gives me a new excuse to link to this.