Kristen Inbody

kinbody@greatfallstribune.com

GLENDIVE — A Tyrannosaurus rex presented mid-roar, a fragment of dinosaur skin, a Pterodactylus with wings spread and a fish preserved forever with its lunch inside.

Some of the most fascinating dinosaur fossils and casts in the state are in a museum that uses them to tell a different story than the one told on the official Montana Dinosaur Trail.

The Glendive Dinosaur & Fossil Museum, founded by Otis Kline, is just off the interstate and easy to spot with a T. rex model breaking through a wall.

The museum has a replacement value of $4 million, though it took less to build (from 2005-2009) with volunteer labor and donations. That doesn’t count the value of the fossils.

A Billings artist does the exhibits, which aim to be more like zoo exhibits than the cliche dry museum display. Only the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman is a larger dinosaur museum in the state.

Among the foundational ideas of the Glendive museum:

•The Bible is an accurate, literal history of the world. The world is about 6,000-6,400 years old and a six-day divine creation.

•The flood of the Bible’s book of Genesis, the Noah’s Ark flood, split the continents apart with water called from the deep and set off a worldwide cataclysm that buried the creatures that would become fossils in one mass event. The long flood, ensuing volcanic eruptions and an ice age radically changed the planet.

•Dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time. Dinosaurs were on the ark.

•Life can not be traced back as branches to a trunk. God created “kinds,” like dog kind from whence sprung dogs, wolves, coyotes. Humans and primates don’t come from the same “kind.” Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon and humans are all of “humankind,” which came from Adam and Eve.

An experienced tour guide, Robert Canen, vice president of administration, presented the debate between evolution and creationism as similar to a court case, where two parties are giving a different interpretation of the same evidence.

“We want you to look through a different lens. Does the fossil record fit a long record, millions or billions of years, or a more recent catastrophe?” he said to those on a tour this spring.

The tour begins with a tyrannosaurus skull and a Bible verse, Job 12:7-10 (“..ask the animals, and they will teach...”).

Visitors walk over a glass bridge above a re-created sea floor and then into a blue chamber of huge underwater creatures.

Among the specimens is an opalized Umoonasaurus fossil from Australia. An Anomalocaris, a predator of the deep, chases a trilobite.

Kline called particular attention to the complex trilobite eye. Trilobites are common among fossils and widely varied, from the size of a pencil eraser to 3 feet across.

“The eye is faceted, like a bee’s eye, and some of the eyes can see 180 degrees, which means with two eyes they could see in a full circle,” he said. “What’s really unique is the eye can correct for light refraction.”

If the trilobite eye is better than eyes in today’s creatures, that would mark degradation instead of progress from the Cambrian Period around 500 million year ago, if one believes in such a long view. Kline also doesn’t buy the way some scientists present the era as one of an explosion in the complexity and diversity of life.

Canen described where the fossils were found, the center of continents and the tops of mountains among locations. The textbook explanation is a gradual rise of mountains from what was sea floor. The museum’s version is God calling up waters of the deep, setting off tsunamis and flooding and depositing marine life in a widespread way.

“How did these creatures come to be in Kansas? The flood is a good explanation,” he said.

The fossil record “is not a progression of simple to complex” but of deep to shallow water to land. Dinosaurs probably lived along the coast and mammals inland in such a scenario.

The Bible also accounts for the size of the specimen in the collection, Canen said. Yes, the science points to more oxygen in the atmosphere then, but think of Methuselah, whom the Bible pegs at 969 years old when he died. If people lived 10 times longer than they do now, apply that factor of 10 to animals.

“Turtles can live 150 years. Take times 10. You have a 1,500-year-old turtle. All these things are going to be amazing when things live 10 times longer,” Canen said.

And if he’s wrong?

“I have no problem admitting when I’m wrong, and that’s something science and this whole field could use more of,” Canen said.

“We think the evidence fits what the Bible says,” Canen said. “You don’t have to be afraid to dig up dino bones.”

Just as panda bear teeth suggest a predator not a vegan, dinosaur teeth may be misleading. The Bible says everything — and that must include a T. rex — was created to eat plants, Canen said. The world was without violence and predation.

“If you want to know what it was designed to eat, you have to talk to the designer,” he said. “The world was quite a different place pre-flood.”

The tour stopped at a window that looks into a lab. The museum does fossil digs in the area, which is part of the Hell Creek formation.

Kline stepped in to explain, with great enthusiasm, the museum’s finds.

“There’s never been a frill found with this shape other than this,” he said.

A display case is packed with scales, figs, clams and a hodgepodge of other finds from the museum foundation’s land, less than two miles away.

“It’s incredible what we found around here,” he said.

The aquatic theme continues with a remarkable cast of a fish within a fish, a 14-foot Xiphactinus with a 6-foot Gillicus inside, excavated in Kansas in 1952.

“It’s amazing it was fossilized that rapidly,” he said. “They have their fins out like they were swimming along and got buried suddenly.”

Among the newest additions is an eel-like ichthyosaur that died giving birth.

But the star of the museum must be Stan, the T. rex.

“Evolutionists look at Stan and say he’s 45 years old (when he died),” Kline said. “I look at Stan and say maybe 450 years old. That could account for the size of Stan.”

Kline gestured to the museum’s triceratops.

“There’s nothing like it before or after in the ‘evolutionary record,’” he said. “It’s a unique creation of God, like everything in this museum.”

One of the other interesting fossil casts is of a struthiomimus as it was found near Glendive, a twist of bones. A cast of how the skeleton is re-articulated will eventually join the display, and Kline hopes for a skin-on model, too.

The second floor is more explicit in its creationist theory.

A model of Noah’s Ark shows dinosaurs as well as cows, horses and people. An exhibit analyzes the math on the space necessary to accommodate the animals and answers frequently asked questions.

“People ask, did he take dinosaurs? Yes,” Canen said. “You could take a juvenile with the genetic capacity to be all dinosaurs.”

Another exhibit looks at Mount St. Helens and seeks to refute the idea striation in rock represents vast layers of time or the idea that the Grand Canyon, for example, was worn away across millions of years. A creation-based interpretation of the Grand Canyon is available in the gift store.

“Mount St. Helens was a boon for creation research,” he said. “Mount St. Helens gives us an alternative perspective on layering.”

The volcano’s 1980 eruption left caverns and lava flows hardened with striation.

“We think the (Grand) Canyon was formed by an Ice Age dam cutting through the layers left by the flood,” he said.

Another exhibit aims to refute radio-metric dating with information about a new kind of dating.

“We’re cutting edge here,” Canen said. “They hold onto (the idea) so long they don’t allow anything to question it.”

Much of the upstairs is about humans and dinosaurs coexisting. Canen said evidence from all over the world points to that.

“They would have had to see these creatures to know what they looked like,” he said.

A Bible room includes historic torah scrolls, a Braile Bible, a copy of a Gutenberg Bible, a Ethiopian Coptic Bible and a 1611 King James Bible. It’s open to Job 40, which Kline believes refers to dinosaurs. The passage reads, “Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox ... He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.”

“Job knew exactly what God was talking about,” Kline said.

“If you can trust any historical document, you can trust the Bible,” Canen said.

The Behemoth is “The most famous dinosaur in the Bible,” according to an exhibit, which compares the Argentinosaurus (161,000 pounds) to an elephant (10,000 pounds). Another exhibit looks at the mastodon, with a striking specimen.

An “in their own words” includes quotes by scientists, educators and philosophers disputing evolution. One calls evolution “a religion.”

A timeline of historical mentions of what Kline believes are dinosaurs is along one wall. One example is a passage from Marco Polo’s 13th-century travelogue in which he described “dragons” (i.e., dinosaurs).

Humans probably hunted the dinosaurs into extinction, according to the narrative, or the climate post-cataclysm was such that dinosaurs didn’t thrive.

Among other evidence for the theory of human-dinosaur cohabitation is a fossil that shows cancer.

“If dinosaurs were before people, that means suffering and disease were before people,” Kline said. But that came only with “the fall,” when people sinned and were cast out from the perfection of Eden.

The beginning was “the best it’s ever going to be,” Kline said. Humanity is “winding down,” which is why there are so many diseases now, he said. A decaying species. Mutating genes. The brain not put to full use.

A wall of portraits features scientists who were Christian, from Sir Francis Bacon, born in 1561, to Wernher von Braun, modern rocket scientist.

Kline hints around a Museum of the Rockies paleontologist Jack Horner project looking into dinosaur and bird links.

“God did many things to confound the lies,” he said.

An exhibit on “birds from dinosaurs” sticks with the “kinds” narrative.

“You’re talking about things that could not be overcome by even a billion years if you believed in evolution,” he said. “There’s bird kind and the dinosaur kind. One did not evolve from another.”

Panels on one wall present an alternative to human evolution. The students sniggered at the idea Lucy, which anthropologists hold to be a 3-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis, could be a “missing link” in human evolution.

“That’s strictly an extinct chimpanzee,” Kline said. “Missing links will always be missing because they never existed. Apes have always been apes; humans have always been humans.”

Kline referred often to “they,” by which he meant the “evolutionary community.”

“They reject what doesn’t fit into their theory,” he said. He said 90 percent of discoveries don’t speak to a long history of the world.

“They choose to believe the impossible because it promotes their cause,” he said. “They don’t want you to believe you’re anything special. God did not send his son to die for a monkey. ... They’ll come up with this to make you less than human.”

The “moral relativism”/ “humanism” has gotten worse in the last eight years, Kline said.

Why have scientists gone to all this trouble?

“Because it fits their particular goal of proving that nothing created everything and therefore they don’t have to be accountable to anything,” Kline said. “If you believe there is in fact a God then pure logic tells you you need to be accountable to your creator. If you don’t want to be accountable you go ahead and believe nothing created everything.”

The controversy

The museum has not been without detractors. Paleontologists have called it a “temple of ignorance” and “the opposite of a science museum.”

Last spring, the museum was in the news after a Washington, D.C., group protested the annual public school field trip to the museum. It was canceled.

Canen said the museum alters tours by audience.

“We don’t apologize for who we are. We won’t turn our signs around, but we make sure we’re sensitive to the group we have going through,” he said. “We focus on the evidence on the ground not interpretation — ‘here’s what we find, here’s what we know for sure.’”

Creationism can’t be taught in public schools as science, but the museum aims to present the “science” of creationism. Kline argues evolution and an old earth also are a “belief” so it’s discrimination to teach one belief over another.

Kline said public school tours don’t go through the biblical history exhibit, but they do take in the exhibit that aims to refute a “missing link” human evolution idea. In particular, Kline wants to show students Haeckel’s Embryos, drawings of embryos showing exaggerated similarity among species.

“We talk about the dinosaurs themselves, about the marine reptiles — the exhibits we have there,” he said. “We do answer questions. If someone asks us a question, we have the right to answer.”

If, say, a student asked if a T. rex was on Noah’s Ark, “I would say the ‘saurus kind’ was on the ark,” Kline said. “There was a dinosaur that would be similar on the ark. God was very specific about sending every kind of air-breathing animal.”

In a small way, the museum also has become a campaign issue. The Billings Gazette reported in 2009 that the Gianforte Family Foundation donated the T. rex and acrocanthosaurus exhibit in the museum’s main display hall. The newspaper called it the largest donation for a specific exhibit.

READ MORE: Gianforte Family Foundation

The foundation, which has given away more than $36 million, was set up by Greg Gianforte, Republican candidate for governor. Christian ministries, among them the Downpour Music Festival and Focus on the Family, are a core category the foundation supports.

Kline said churches have adopted the museum as they would any other mission. Foundations, which he declined to name, have or do support the museum, but most donations come from individuals. Add that to museum admission, income from dinosaur dig programs and gift shop items.

This year Kline expects the museum will top 10,000 visitors for the first time. Visitation has been steadily rising; last year saw 9,800 visitors.

Steve Bohin, a Massachusetts student studying at the Jackson Hole Bible College, said his interest in dinosaurs is recent, sparked by the Bill “Science Guy” Nye and Christian author Ken Ham debate on evolution v. creationism.

He said his tour of the museum “gave more evidence of young creation and proves God’s word is true,” he said. “It helps support what God said. Faith and evidence should go hand-in-hand. The Bible is practical.”

Reach Tribune Staff Writer Kristen Inbody at kinbody@greatfallstribune.com. Follow her on Twitter at @GFTrib_KInbody.

If you go:

WHAT: Glendive Dinosaur & Fossil Museum

WHO: 10,000 visitors are expected this season

WHERE: 139 State St, Glendive

WHEN: Open Tuesday-Saturday from May 17- Sept. 3; Friday-Saturday now and in September and October as well as after Thanksgiving. Open the week after Christmas.

HOW MUCH: $7 adults, $6 seniors/students, $5 children, free for children under 2

ONLINE: creationtruth.org