THERE WERE DINOSAURS ON NOAH'S ARK! This diorama proves it!

It's hot and humid in the rolling hills west of Akron, perfect weather for hunting dinosaurs. Students from Lake Central Christian Academy line up outside the T-rex paddock, anxiously waiting their turn to kill the beast. They're standing in a playground called Truassic Park, behind the Akron Fossil and Science Center, located on Cleveland-Massillon Road in Copley Township.

The boys and girls step onto a wooden platform overlooking a grassy field where hand-painted cardboard dinosaurs have been placed at odd intervals, like yard markers at a Special Olympics driving range. At the edge of the platform a water-balloon launcher is mounted between two poles. A bucket of balloons, slick with condensation, sits below. Each of the grade-schoolers tries to hit a dinosaur with a balloon. Some succeed. Others miss and are chided by their peers. But everyone is having an awesome day.

Their teachers are happy too, because these kids are actually learning about history — one version of it, anyway. The curators at the Akron Fossil and Science Center believe humans coexisted with dinosaurs. They teach the visiting students (some from nearby public schools, according to managers) that T-rexes and pterodactyls survived until the 1800s, when cowboys hunted them to extinction.

And if you think that's scary, wait 'til you see the tour.

Creation museums are nothing new. But ever since creationism's modern guise, "intelligent design," was exiled from public schools by a federal judge in Pennsylvania in 2005, they've grown more prolific and more elaborate.

The new $27 million Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, is a high-tech, 60,000-square-foot facility which includes a 200-seat special-effects theater, a 30-foot-tall depiction of a section of Noah's Ark, and exhibits created by the same man who designed the Jaws ride at Universal Studios. More than 4,000 visitors toured the museum on opening day last week.

The 2-year-old Akron Fossil and Science Center was founded by local financial planner William Sanderson II, who once taught middle-school science in Cincinnati. The museum is open for general admission Thursdays through Saturdays, but it also offers a weekly high-school-level biology class, a summer camp for kids and a creationist canoe expedition.

"Creationists mimic science," says Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, which helps communities deal with fundamentalists bent on introducing everyone's children to creationism. "[Their] scientific claims are simply wrong and have been debunked long ago, and students who are misled by them are likely to be at a disadvantage as they study science at institutes of higher learning. For students who are staying in the creationist ghetto, it won't be such a factor. But someone hoping to learn about biology is going to be shortchanged because they're being fed untruths at Truassic Park and at the Creation Museum."

The repercussions will be felt for generations. "I think they will have a deleterious effect on the public's understanding of science," cautions Branch. "It's going to make the job of teaching science harder. There'll be a kid in the teacher's class who says, "Boy, I went to this museum the other day and they told me all the things you've been telling us are bogus.'"

But the most dangerous development is a "fair and balanced" media that gives equal time to mystics who believe in a younger earth when reporting on science fact.

"The creation museums are playing this as a science versus religion story," says Branch. "This is not science versus religion. This is religiously motivated bad science versus good science."

The docent, Josiah Detwiler, is a fresh-faced young man in his early 20s. Detwiler shows visitors to the "screening room," a small area packed with folding chairs facing a color TV. He plugs in a DVD of an animated video of a human cell manufacturing a protein. A soothing male voice (God?) speaks to the beautiful complexity of this process. We learn about DNA and enzymes and amino acids, how they all work together to form a single protein, operating like a complex machine designed for one specific purpose.

And that's the key word — design.

"What are the chances that a protein can be created through evolution, through chance?" asks Detwiler. "About one in three hundred trillion."

There is another game to demonstrate this point. In the corner of the room is an open wooden box sitting on a table, below a bright neon sign that reads: Chance! Even from a distance, this looks quite fun. Inside are small buckets, each filled with 17 wooden letter blocks. The object of the game is to roll out the blocks and see if the letters match up with a specific sequence of 17 amino acids that form a protein. It's a little like Yahtzee, only no one ever wins.

"You can see the complexity of a protein and understand that it was designed," says Detwiler. "Kind of like your watch. If we found your watch in nature, with all the moving parts working together, you wouldn't say it evolved, would you? It was designed by someone for a specific purpose. Take the E. coli bacterium." He points to a chart that illustrates a cross-section of an E. coli flagella, a tail-like structure that propels the bacterium through our bodies, operating much like a boat's outboard motor. "It's so complex that if you took away one part, it could not function. Each part has to work together. Evolution cannot explain this. This can't happen through random mutation."

He holds up a fossil common to Northeast Ohio, a trilobite, an extinct sea creature that looks like a giant potato bug. "Trilobites had eyes that are more complex than those that can be found on animals today," says Detwiler. "This goes against evolution and the Second Law of Thermodynamics."

(For those who fell asleep during Physics 101, the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that "the entropy of the universe tends toward the maximum," meaning things should become more chaotic and less orderly over time, that everything in the universe is slowly shutting down and falling apart. Not to bum you out or anything, but you shouldn't make any long-term plans.)

"When God created man and the animals, he made the most perfect specimens," says Detwiler. "And each generation after Adam and Eve is like a copy of a copy on a Xerox machine. Which is why you see unhealthy people today, why there's more cancer."

A visitor notes that in the drawing hanging on the wall, Adam resembles Ronald Reagan. "He does," says Detwiler, nodding. "Never noticed that before." He's not sure if that was the designer's intent.

The next room is a winding walkway that passes by several exhibits telling the history of the universe. It's a short walk. After all, this universe is only 6,000 years old.

"Fossils aren't necessarily billions of years old," says Detwiler. He hands over a fossil of a teddy bear. "That was made in a day. It was put in a river with the right sediments and it fossilized in a day. All you need to make a fossil is water and the right kind of mud."

According to the Akron Fossil and Science Center, whose name implies expertise in both fossils and science, the entire fossil record was created during the biblical Great Flood. If you look closely at the model of Noah's ark that was built for the museum, you can see a brachiosaurus standing inside, not far from the cow cages, which is just poor planning, given the brachiosaurus' high-pitched mating calls and the bovine propensity to stampede when frightened.

How did the dinosaurs fit on the ark, you may ask.

"Noah probably selected young dinosaurs."

Duh.

And we know that dinosaurs were on the ark because there's so much evidence that they survived well into the 20th century, the guide explains. "Marco Polo wrote about seeing dragons during his trip around the world," says Detwiler. "And of course we believe the Loch Ness Monster is a plesiosaur." The tour moves past accounts of cowboys encountering pterodactyls in 1890 and the story of a missionary from Warren who claimed to have met pygmies in Africa who killed a brontosaurus.

At the end, Detwiler hands his visitors a pamphlet. "Bad news," it reads. "You are a sinner. But the bad news gets worse the penalty for sin is death."

Note to museum directors: Don't threaten people with death until after they visit the gift shop.