Creation Museum Launches Nationwide 'Dinosaur' Billboard Campaign
The Creation Museum of Kentucky has launched a nationwide billboard campaign featuring dinosaurs and other prehistoric lizards.
The Petersburg, Ky.-based museum set up several billboards featuring comic-book-style cartoons of various dinosaurs last week in cities like Chicago, Houston, and San Francisco.
Mark Looy, co-founder and chief communications officer for Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum, told The Christian Post that the Museum annually conducts ad campaigns.
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"This year we decided on using billboards, partly because our regional billboard campaign to promote the Creation Museum was so effective a few years ago," said Looy. "It was so successful that a tourism association in Kentucky, KTIA, gave our museum billboards its top advertising award in 2009, out of 200 entries."
Looy explained that the focus on dinosaurs came in part because the museum has several exhibits that focus on the prehistoric creatures.
"Through animatronic dinosaurs that move realistically and a collection of real dinosaur fossils, the Creation Museum uses dinosaurs to help teach the true history of the world, according to the Bible," said Looy.
"Evolutionists use dinosaurs as much as anything to promote their naturalistic worldview, but we show how they support the biblical worldview."
But some science teachers are expressing concern over the message the museum is sending to youths, according to The Associated Press.
"It's a hook, it's a bait to get people to say, `Hey let's go to that museum' – and then the other message is brought out," said Steven Newton, a program director at the Oakland, California-based National Center for Science Education, AP reported.
"I think it's a real shame that there aren't science museums that are competing in the same way, with the same sort of advertising with the same sort of budgets."
The nationwide billboard campaign comes several weeks after the museum celebrated its fifth year of operation. To celebrate the milestone, the Creation Museum erected a holographic exhibit on the famous "Lucy" find.
"As this exhibit conclusively shows, the Lucy fossils belong to a knuckle-walking, ape-like creature. We can see that Lucy's V-shaped mandible was very ape-like, nothing like that of a human," said Dr. David Menton, staff scientist for the Creation Museum, in an earlier interview with CP.
"Our exhibit also demonstrates how significant artistic license can be employed in interpreting what Lucy resembled. There simply isn't enough information found in the fossil bones for anyone to determine what Lucy looked like."
"As people are going on vacation, these billboards will attract even more visitors to the museum this summer," said Looy.
"The museum is located within a day's drive of almost 2/3 of America's population, and it's not too far from I-75, perhaps the busiest north-south interstate in America."
According to Looy, there are over 100 billboards in 24 states, including ones near Dinosaur World in Florida and the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah.
