Noah's ark replica badly damaged after colliding with coastguard boat in Oslo

No animals were on board at the time and no one was hurt in the collision

The damage of the hull of a wooden ship built to represent Noah's Ark after it crashed into a moored Coast Guard vessel (AP)

A life-sized replica of Noah’s ark has been badly damaged after colliding with a coastguard boat in the port of Oslo.

The replica, the smaller of two crafts that took carpenter Johan Huibers seven years to build, crashed in the Norwegian capital when the crew towing it lost control.

Designed to educate people about faith, the arks have had more than a million visitors, who came to see peacocks, rabbits and llamas, and replicas of giraffes, penguins and tigers.

No animals were on board at the time and no one was hurt in the collision, although the head of a ferry company in the area, Ole Herman Kjernsby, told the New York Times there was “a huge hole” in the side of the boat.

The Dutch carpenter said he built the arks after he had a dream the Netherlands had flooded.

The damaged boat is 45 feet high and 230 feet long and has about a fifth of the capacity that Noah’s ark would have had.

The incident prompted amusement on social media. Crime novelist Tom Egeland wrote: “It’s unclear what happened to the 8.7 million x 2 animals on board,” in reference to the estimated number of species on earth.

Bethany Brown wrote: “In Mr Huibers’ defence, Noah had no traffic to deal with on the water, just corpses.”

Mr Peters, a dutch puppeteer who bought the boat in 2010 has taken it for visits to towns across the Netherlands. He was preparing to take it to visit sites in Norway when it crashed. Both arks have to be towed wherever they go as neither has an engine.

The smaller ark was the first built between 2005 and 2007, before he built one of more biblical proportions - measuring around 410 feet long, 95 feet wide and 75 feet tall.