Thailand has a new place to store its old bones, and this one looks like a winner, with exhibits straight out of the museum in “Jurassic Park” that the velociraptors and
T Rex wrecked.

As reported recently by The Nation’s Aree Chaisatien (the two top photos here are from the newspaper too), the Bt383-million Sirindhorn Museum in northeastern Kalasin province was unofficially opened in April and is piling in the visitors, 30,000 in May, thanks to the reassembled skeletons of some of the dinosaurs they’ve been pulling out of the ground in Isaan for the past 20 years. An estimated 10,000 dino-fossils have been dug up in Thailand since 1976.

“Isaan Jurassic Park” is what the sign out front says, predictably enough, but if that’s what it takes to get kids interested in science, why not? Among the unique specimens unearthed in the region — usually after farmers and their water buffalo rammed into a bone while tilling — is the long-necked, 20-metre-tall Phuwiangosaurus Sirindhornae.

Its near-complete bonework, 130 million years old, sizes up edible tourists in one section of the museum, alongside the giant remains of Isanosaurus Attavipatchi, granddaddy of the world’s sauropods, and the metre-tall, rather cute Psittacosaurus Sattayaraki, which has a beak like a parrot’s.

At the museum entrance is Siamotyrannus isanensis, eldest of all the fearsome tyrannosaurs and not cute at all, and from its shadow you follow dinosaur footprints throughout the facility, past a display board that defines “survivors” as “those who can adjust to the environment – not those who adjust the environment to suit their limitless desires”.

There’s a chamber devoted to “The Universe and the Earth”, where the origins of life are explained and an aquarium-like panorama demonstrates how tsunamis occur, then a zone called “Mesozoic: the Era of Reptiles and Dinosaurs”, where skeletons of flying lizards soar overhead, and “The Life of Dinosaurs”, where small screens called “ghost boxes” play animations showing how T Rex walked and laid its eggs and how huge herbivores managed to get enough food.

“In the zone dedicated to the Cenozoic Era – the transition period between the dinosaurs and the age of mammals – shadows on the floor suddenly bloom with animated sunflowers when visitors step on them,” Aree reports. “Finally, there is another reminder: ‘Environment is the key to evolution.’ The idea is to get people wondering whether what happened to the dinosaurs might happen to man if the global ecology is thrown out of balance.”

The photo here, showing Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, after whom the new museum is named, not to mention at least one of the newly discovered dinosaur species, visiting the excavation site at Wat Sakkawan in Kalasin in 1995, comes from Kasetsart University’s Amazing Thailand pages.

That dig site, adjacent to the temple seen in the lower centre of the larger Google Earth image below, is presumably now the museum, though I’m not sure if the facility circled and enlarged in the accompanying picture is the museum. It looks like one, but judging from a rather nasty pond beside it, maybe it’s a factory. Or maybe the pond is that colour from the dinosaur-hide tanning process. Who knows?

Just east of the wat and the museum and immediately north of the town of Huai Phueng is the massive Phu Faek Forest Park, and it was here in 1996, in the foothills of the Phu Phan mountains, says TourismThailand.org, that “two girls were having lunch with their parents and they noticed strange footprints in the middle of a rock terrace”.

Geologists were summoned and decided they were looking at seven footprints of meat-eating dinosaurs, about 140 million years old. The tourism website recommends the trek, though it says, without explaining, that “at present there are only four footprints that can be seen clearly”. Not to worry, the surroundings are lovely, and quite apart from the museum, Kalasin has a lot of other interesting things to amuse visitors.