The author and two friends visit the Creation Museum of the Ozarks, a tiny creationist museum in Missouri led by assistants Kurtis and Sherry in the absence of the director. The museum promotes long-debunked claims like "living fossils" disproving evolution and pseudoscientific ideas copied from cryptozoology. Many displays contradict paleontological evidence or each other. The author critiques several hoaxes and misidentifications presented as evidence against evolution.

1. Six Impossible Things Before Lunch A Day Trip to the Creation Museum of the Ozarks

2. DISCLAIMER This presentation makes no tedious claims of being “fair and balanced” or “unbiased.” There’s no such thing as magic, the world is several billion years old, and holding anthropocentric views of the universe in the 21stcentury is laughable at best. Deal.

3. Last Saturday, Thomas, Scott and I loaded up and headed to Strafford. We were off to visit the Creation Museum of the Ozarks. The brainchild of Dr. Rod Butterworth, this ministry has big dreams of a multi-million dollar facility amongst Branson’s elite tourist destinations. In October 2010, they finally set up a starter museum just outside of Springfield.

4. (Scott!)  Calling it a hole in the wall would be getting your expectations up.

5. To compound the awkwardness, Dr. Butterworth was out of town and left everything to his assistants, Kurtis and Sherry. Their hyper cheery and polite natures made it too painful to ask any real questions.

6. …wait a minute…

7. The CMOTO may be tiny, but it’s full of BIG ADVENTURE!!! (by “adventure” I mean “lies”)

8. SAME EVIDENCE, DIFFERENT VIEWS (plus some hoaxes) The line that CMOTO espouses is similar to the one held by the Kentucky Creation Museum and others. “We all work from the same evidence,” Kurtis told us, “we just have different ways of interpreting it.” Which is true. Scientists go at things from an empirical, naturalistic perspective and creationists make shit up

9. Living Fossils : There were several exhibits that pointed to living fossils such as coelacanths, horseshoe crabs, and hissing cockroaches. These are supposed to disprove evolution. Not true. -- You don’t have to adapt if your environment doesn’t call for it. All this proves is that the organism in question is adapted extremely well and their environment doesn’t change much. -- “Living fossils” are usually distinct species from their ancient relatives, as this photo humorously demonstrates.

10. Great Psuedosciences Think Alike: Creationists love to crib notes from a more respectable field of psuedoscience, cryptozoology. Take this Thunderbird diorama. Cryptozoologists think, “Hey! Maybe a population of pterosaurs survived for millions of years and live with us today! That would explain the myth of the Thunderbird!” Creationists go one further and say “Hey! Maybe they didn’t REALLY live millions of years ago!” There is NO EVIDENCE for either group’s claims. Even if it were true, that still doesn’t disprove evolution. If a Native American myth were true…why does that validate Judeo-Christian myth?

11. Hoaxes and misinterpretations: Ica stones “T-Rex Blood Cells” “Dinosaur” petroglyphs and carvings. The London Artifact

12. The AlvisDelk Track: To his credit, Kurtis actually admitted that most dinosaur/man footprints are fake. Most creationists won’t. However, he asserted that this one was “probably genuine”. How can one doubt? It says right there on the tin– “verified by spiral CT scan!” He states scientists are, once again, trying to cover this up. Is it really so damning? Any sportsmen want to take a stab atwhat’s wrong with this picture?

13. HERE’S A HINT An actual theropod print The Delk Print A real footprint cast in THE SAME FREAKING MUSEUM that shows just how full of shit you are.

14. About Those Cover-Ups: Our guides frequently alluded to evolutionist “cover-ups” of their evidence. Scientists won’t even let the information out, they say. Not true! All of these are not only easily found, but easily debunked with a simple Google search. I wasn’t the only one who spotted this as an obvious hoax. Even PZ Myers covered it.

15. It wasn’t covered up It wasn’t ignored It was looked at and dismissed as the OBVIOUS FAKE IT WAS because you MORONS don’t know what an animal track LOOKS LIKE and think everyone else is as STUPID as YOU!

16. A lot of errors were made out of sheer laziness Fossils were misidentified everywhere. Camptosaur skull identified as a Hadrosaurus. (the skull of which has never been found, by the way) Iguanodont identified as theropod footprint.

17. A sauropod (“long-neck”) skull was confused with a duck-billed dinosaur. Which is pretty hard to do if you have any passion about dinosaurs at all. (At least they corrected this one mistake.)

18. Here’s a doozy: In 2009, scientists uncovered remains of a female early hominid called Ardipithicus. There was an ensuing media frenzy, and it turns out that it wasn’t as closely related to us as hyped. It’s still closer to us than chimps, though. Still an ape. Still a hominid. Kurtis told us that Ardi was debunked as “just a lemur.” That’s a little beyond laziness. In science, mistakes are bugs in the system. In creationism, it’s a feature.

19. In conclusion It doesn’t matter how many Fig Newtons and Capri Suns they offer you. Creationists are malicious liars that prey on the ignorant. Labeling matters! It helps if your displays don’t contradict each other. A trip to the zoo is a quick way to cleanse your brain. I suck at conclusions.

20. Dinosaurs and Dragon Legends Kurtis took us to the back to watch this video. Happily, it’s available on Youtube, so you can watch it too! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usYjgy7I_bs Surely, you will be convinced.

21. In-depth debunk: the fire-breathing duckbill Parasaurolophus was a Lambeosaurinehadrosaur; a family of duckbills that are renowned for their funky-ass headcrests.

22. Many scientists now think that these crests were used to produce sounds. In 1998 the crest was cat-scanned, digitally recreated, and constructed in real-life by Sandia National Labs. By blowing air through it, scientists can roughly recreate what the animal sounded like. But who needs computers when you have the bible?!?

23. The Creation Museum of the Ozarks presents this idea for your approval:

24. Our guide told us the crest worked like the modern day bombardier beetles, which shoot hot chemicals out of their butt. This would prove fire-breathing Biblical monsters true, somehow. Could the crest have stored and deployed acid this way?

25. I called Dr. Tom Williamson,curator of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuequerque. He’s the paleontologist behind the original sound recreation experiment. “Dr. Williamson, is there any reason why Parasaurolophus couldn't shoot liquid fiery death at all who opposed him? ”

26. Dr. williamsonsez: There is no living analog creature that shoots acid or fire out of its nose. (Hah! Just what an evolutionist would say, I thought.) The walls of the crest are very thin, and have no evidence of containing any chemical spewing bits. Which you don’t need to look for anyways, because The crest is part of the animal’s respiratory system. Ouch. Well how about that.

27. I eagerly await the creationist rebuttal. The end