The model of the Ark at the Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm took a thousand hours to build. It is built in scale with the dimensions in the Bible and in scale with the model animals. The vessel was huge.

To verify whether a timber-built vessel of this size could really float we asked Professor Andrews of the London School of Naval Architecture to allow a student to do a research project on it. He agreed. Thomas Grafton studied the Ark as part of his degree course and showed that it most certainly would have floated. In his review of the project, Charles Betts, chief naval architect for the British Navy, considered that the Ark would have been able to withstand a force-12 gale.

The Ark had 3 floors, and a window above the roof 18 inches wide. A long thin window like that would have been ideal for ventilation and for letting light in. Our model of the Ark has slatted passage- ways, to let some light through all the way to the lowest floor.

The big black rooms in the model are for water tanks. They would have been filled with rain from the roof. On the opposite side from where the animals are being loaded is the top floor with Noah’s family rooms, including an eating room and bedrooms for each of the four married couples. There is a loo with a cover and a pipe to the bilges below, also a wooden sink and a wood-burning cooker.

Many of the animals would have needed to eat 100 kgs of food a day (that’s as heavy as a big 16-stone rugby player), and to drink 50-100 litres of water a day (that’s a bath-full). So they would have made a lot of poo and urine. What a smell! But no doubt they’d get used to it after a bit!

On the bottom floor of the model bamboo pipes carry water from the tanks to the animals, since it would have been too much work to carry all the water by hand every day. There’s food on every floor, suitable for the animals on that floor. One way of keeping fresh meat would have been to keep a room full of giant tortoises. Giant tortoises hibernate and wouldn’t have known they were going to be lunch for a meat-eating animal! A trap door above the big cat cage is for throwing the cats’ meat down to them.

You’ll also see we have put dinosaurs on the ark, because Noah would also, of course, have taken young dinosaurs on board.

Not as many animals were on board the Ark as is often assumed. Research still needs to be done on this, but it could be that God originally made only a few hundred different kinds of land animal, plus a similar number of birds and insects. The great number of species we see around us today would have been the result of variety developing within the original kinds. So there would have been plenty of space, both for two of each of the kinds and for the food they needed. They would have needed food for a whole year, perhaps much longer, given that it would have been some time before food plants began growing on the earth again after the Flood.