New Breed of Museums

Creation Museum. Petersburg, Kentucky. Opened May, 2007. Designed by a former Universal Studios exhibit director with a budget of $27 million.

The state-of-the-art 65,000 square foot museum brings the pages of the Bible to life, casting its characters and animals in dynamic form and placing them in familiar settings. Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden. Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s Rivers. The serpent coils cunningly in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Majestic murals, great masterpieces brimming with pulsating colors and details, provide a backdrop for many of the settings.~Off website.

Museum Plagiarius. Solingen, Germany. Opened April 2007. Since 1977 Plagiarius co-founder Rido Busse has been giving out plagiarism awards. The awards: a black garden gnome with a golden nose.

The Museum Plagiarius, in the German city of Solingen near Cologne, will permanently exhibit some 300 original products together with inferior rip-offs produced by unscrupulous companies out for a quick buck. Its message: Plagiarism kills innovation. "Companies have spent time and money making these products; if someone steals that idea, then they are also stealing the incentive to invent," says the museum's curator, Christine Lacroix.~businessweek.com

And my personal favorite.
Mutter Museum. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Opened 1858.

It contains a collection of medical oddities, anatomical and pathological specimens, wax models, and antique medical equipment. The museum is located at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The original purpose of the collection, donated by doctor Thomas Dent Mutter in 1858, was medical research and education. The museum is best known for its large collection of skulls and anatomical specimens including a wax model of a woman with a human horn growing out of her forehead, the tallest skeleton on display in North America, a 5'-long human colon that contained over 40 pounds of fecal matter, and the petrified body of the mysterious Soap Lady.~From Wikipedia