Having strutted around with the oldest of the tyrannosaurs at the Sirindhorn Dinosaur Museum, I just kept on looking around Isaan — Thailand’s Northeast — at all the other places they’re been digging up bones for the past four decades.

It all ended up here, on Google Earth, of course. The basic information I used on the tour came from Kasetsart University’s Amazing Thailand pages and a nice synopsis courtesy of Anurak Tourism Thailand. The rest took a lot of digging, fittingly enough.

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Ancient fish fossils were discovered and identified in northern Thailand in 1916, but it wasn’t until the 1970s and ’80s that the breadth of what lies beneath was determined. The Sirindhorn is one of two museums opening this year as Thailand catches up with its very distant past, but the most interesting spots are still out in the field or, more correctly, up on the towering Korat Plateau. First, that other museum.

Set for its official opening later this year, the Petrified Wood Museum at Ban Krok Duean Ha in Nakhon Ratchasima’s Tambon Suranaree is the first of its kind in Asia, and the fruit of a decade’s research by geologist Pratueng Jintasakul.

I was keen to hear about this place because I’ve been dragging a chunk of petrified wood around with me since I was a kid, a gift from my cousin John Dorsey. Spookily, I wondered where it was as I read about the museum, cast a casual glance over the bookcase behind me, and there it was right away, just staring at me as if to say, “About time!” That’s it in the photo, the actual specimen in my actual hand hovering over my actual bed.

And so it is. There are more than 10,000 pieces of petrified wood at the Korat museum, from pebble to boulder size, ranging in age from one million to 70 million years old. Adding to the museum’s appeal are displays of the sabre-tooth tigers, three-hoofed horses, short-necked giraffes, mammoths and, yes, dinosaurs that Prateung came across in the vicinity.

Doubling as a research centre, the museum has three spacious exhibition halls where the fossils get an injection of hi-tech life through simulations and multimedia. Visitors take seats in a small theatre for a virtual journey to the very beginnings of time. The Big Bang is explained, and the terrestrial volcanic activity that follows shakes their chairs.

Off to Phu Wiang National Park, then, where some of the more amazing things in Amazing Thailand happened.

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Thailand has several places that have called themselves “Jurassic Park” since the movie came out, but 380-square-kilometre Phu Wiang National Park surely deserves the distinction most.

This is where, in 1976, uranium prospector Sutham Yaemniyom found little ore but instead stumbled upon a large bone that turned out to be the kneecap of a long-necked sauropod. The model pictured here actually stands on the highway outside the Sirindhorn Museum in Kalasin.

Within a few years more dinosaurs turned up in Thailand, the Northeastern Geological Survey Team discovering fossils at the Chulabhorn Dam in Chaiyaphum province and in Udon Thani’s Nong Bua Lampho district, as well as 190-million-year-old teeth from a crocodile that was given the name Sunosuchus Thailandicus.

The Phu Wiang Dinosaur Museum displays life-size models of dinosaurs along with rib cages, spines and neck and collar bones. Also found in the area have been remnants of mastodons and ancient giraffes. Interest in the discoveries was keen enough that the area was declared a national park to protect the fossils.

Although China, with its vast empty spaces, has in recent years emerged as the primary hunting ground for dinosaur relics, there is much more still to be found in every corner of the planet. In 2006 LiveScience.com reported on a statistical analysis predicting that more than 1,300 unique dinosaur genera still await discovery.

With 527 genera identified thus far, the researchers forecast that 75 per cent of all discoverable genera will be found within the next 100 years, and that 1,850 dinosaur genera will eventually be known. Thanks in part to an increasingly international effort, the 1990s saw an 85-per-cent jump in new fossil discoveries. That said, scientists believe that nearly half of all dinosaur genera that ever existed died without leaving any trace.

There are four Phu Wiang excavation sites that welcome visitors, up to a thousand a day on holidays, despite the rigorous trek. There have been nine different sites on the Korat Plateau, spreading across 20 kilometres, but the four “public” sites are along a six-kilometre marked trail.

The public can peer through the glass walls of roofed buildings. In most cases only enough of the encrusting rock has been chiselled away from the bones to allow for identification. One news source indicated that, at at least one site, visitors can touch the bones, under the watchful gaze of rangers on the lookout for thieves. Some of the dinosaur sites in Thailand have seen bones walk off into the smuggler’s market in magical charms.

In 1981 at Huai Pratu Teema, known as Dig Site 3, the Thai-French Dinosaur Survey team that included Varavudh Suteethorn came across the most perfect sauropod skeleton thus far found in Thailand, again a new species, and named it Phuwiangosaurus sirindhornae in honour of Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, daughter of His Majesty King Bhumipol Adulyadej and a keen science student in her own right.

One scholarly online source indicates that, of four phuwiangosaurus specimens discovered, two are kept at the Department of Mineral Resources in Bangkok, another is at the museum outside this park, and a fourth was somehow “destroyed”. That appears to be outdated information, though, as we shall see.

In 1982 here at Phu Pratu Teema, the original Dig Site 1, the Thai-French Dinosaur Survey unearthed a 15-metre-tall sauropod called camarasaurus (vaulted-chamber lizard), one of the larger vegetarian dinosaurs.

It was found in a rubble of teeth from relatively tiny meat-eating dinosaurs that probably had it for supper. One tooth proved to belong to a previously unknown species, and this was named Siamosaurus suteethorni, after the discoverer, Varavuth Suthithorn.

A cylindrical structure that rises up a hillside in layers leads to Dig Site 2 here at Tham Jia. There are six neck bones encrusted in rock from another Phuwiangosaurus sirindhornae.

Alongside Site 2, visitors to the park can see the surface evidence of a 175-million-year-old shell “cemetery”, littered with the fossils of various molluscs as well as crocodiles and small predators.

Here at Hin Lard Yao, known as Dig Site 9, in 1993 were found the hip and tail bones of the ancient scavenger Siamotyrannus Isanesis. This grandfather of Tyrannosaurus Rex was discovered by Varavudh Suteethorn, the country’s leading palaeontologist, and a French team led by Eric Buffetaut.

It was 21 feet long and weighed two tons, a midget in comparison with his famous descendant, but otherwise alike in appearance. Previously unknown in the region, it lived between 120 million and 130 million years ago, long before T Rex, giving credence to a theory that tyrannosaurids originated in Asia.

Palaeontologists in China have since pushed the tyrannosaurs’ age back even further, with Guanlong wucaii (”crowned dragon”) being discovered in the Junggar Basin in 2006. It lived around 160 million years ago, making it also older by 30 million years than Dilong paradoxous, found in China not long before.

In the vicinity of a dry creek bed to the north of the other dig sites are 68 dinosaur footprints preserved in stone, dated to 140 million years ago. Most are those of small species of meat-eaters of the genus Coelurosaurus, but there is one much bigger print believed to be that of a member of the carnosauria family.

At the edge of the Korat Plateau are a series of photogenic, multi-level waterfalls dropping as much as 15 metres, and several caves inhabited by humans long ago. Tham Pha Mue Daeng (Red Palm Cave) is so-named for its stencils of hands made with sprays of a red ochre pigment. Human bones, utensils and other artefacts have been found there. The photo here is actually from another painted cave in the Northeast.

In Phu Kao-Phu Phan Kham National Park are dinosaur footprints and the prehistoric hunters’ drawings of Muem and Rekha Khanit caves, at least 3,500 years old, while at Wat Phra Phutthabat Phu Kao on a hillside in the same park there are recesses in the rock walls whose shapes — like human and dog footprints — form the basis for some local folk stories.

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Somewhere here near the eastern entrance to Nam Nao National Park (actually in Thailand’s North, not Isaan) in 1992, Nares Sattayarak of the Department of Mineral Resources uncovered the oldest dinosaur fossils found thus far in Thailand — and Southeast Asia — those of a fairly large prosauropod. It was dubbed Isanosaurus attavipatchi.

The long-necked herbivore, not previously found in the region, was, at eight metres in length judging by the femora and other bones found, bigger than any of the world’s other prosauropods. Moreover, it was discovered in the Nam Phong geological formation, which dates to the late Triassic Period, 210 million years ago, establishing for the first time that sauropods existed before the Jurassic age.

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This is the Non Mueang Archaeological Site. In 1982 this 35-hectare excavation site began turning up human skeletons, utensils and the accoutrements of ritual burial dating from three periods — late prehistory, the Dvaravati “kingdom” that lasted from the sixth to the 11th centuries, and the subsequent Khmer epoch.

Two city moats have been found around the low oval hill, as well as heart-shaped sandstone temple markers and pieces of earthenware pottery with rope-like motifs.

Ban Chiang is still a bustling Udon Thani village, and the soil on which it rests has offered Thailand’s most significant anthropological discoveries. In the 1960s at what is now revered as the Ban Chiang Archaeological Site, archaeologists began unearthing evidence of a society 5,000 years old, predating sites in China and Mesopotamia as the earliest known agrarian, bronze-making culture, and suggesting that the region could have been one of the world’s cradles of civilisation. That’s why the village is now a World Heritage Site.

The Ban Chiang National Museum offers a multitude of exhibits on both what was discovered and the archaeological process.

Some of the graves found there are Neolithic, from about 2100 BC, while later ones, up to circa AD 200, contained bronze burial gifts. From the website GuideToThailand.com: “In all, 126 skeletons were discovered intact, buried with the pottery and metal tools it was thought they would need in the afterlife. One 4,000-year-old skeleton was nicknamed ‘Nimrod’ because he showed all the marks of a mighty hunter: unusually tall, and buried with deer antlers, hunting weapons and a necklace of tiger claws.”

The universities of Pennsylvania and Hawaii have both been involved here, plotting the community’s first-millennium contacts with India, the unexpected antiquity of settled village life, ancient metal technologies and the development of rice cultivation. In 1982 the Smithsonian Institute created a travelling exhibition called “Ban Chiang: Discovery of a Lost Bronze Age”.

Ban Prasat Archaeological Site is Thailand’s second-most important outdoor archaeological museum, after Ban Chiang. This Bronze Age settlement has since the late 1970s yielded human skeletons and pottery dating back 1,500 to 3,000 years. The Green Isaan Project financed the excavation of three pits here by the government’s Fine Arts Department.

At descending layers of a community surrounded by a moat have been found a kiln and colour-glazed pottery of mixed Khmer and modern styles, and swords and other weapons going back at least 600 years ago. Beneath these were bronze lances, stone beads in strange shades and black painted pottery with incised decorations, all likely from the Dvaravati Period 1,600 to 1,800 years ago.

The deepest layer contained skeletons, large animal bones and ornaments made of animal bones and shells and an ancient weapon shaped like a chakra wheel — a discus made of white marble-like stone. This information is from KoratMagazine.in.th.

This is the village of Ban Lao Na Di in Khon Kaen, which I’m assuming is the “Ban Na Di” that became famous in 1966 when archaeologists Wilhelm Solheim, Chester Gorman and Donn Bayard unearthed proof that Southeast Asian culture was as advanced, if not moreso, that the concurrent civilisation of Mesopotamia. It was determined that the pottery made and the rice cultivated here was the oldest in the world, dating back to as far as 1500 BC, although some believe 3000 BC is more likely.

The bare soil you can see to the south of the village could be Non Nok Tha, as the original settlement and the dig site were known. It was described as a low mound of about six acres near two small streams on the Korat Plateau, and Ban Na Di as a “Thai-Lao village”.

The inhabitants were dark-skinned, probably related to Australia’s Aborigines, and were part of what has been called the Phu Lon Bronze Age complex, a copper-mining and smelting Bronze Age culture that developed along the Mekong River.

In 60 burial mounds here, along with human remains, were bronze casting moulds, tools, weapons and jewellery, a revelation that metallurgy had begun in the region much earlier than believed. Southeast Asians did in fact control the world’s richest source of tin, which they mixed with copper to make bronze, while the Mesopotamians hazardously fused copper and arsenic.

In charting this civilisation’s unprecedented development, the findings here are often cited in tandem with those of Ban Chiang, Dong Son and Hoa Binh in Vietnam, and another Thai site, Spirit Cave in the North, near the Burmese border. The cave’s name derives from its ancient use as a mausoleum.

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What’s identified on my government map as the “150 Millions Year Shellfish Museum” is across the hilly edge of Nong Bua Lamphu’s Mueang district, and it displays the best of what’s been uncovered in a vast shell “graveyard” found on the 50-metre-high sandstone cliffs nearby.

Crocodile fossils mixed in with the mollusc remains, all dating from the Jurassic Period, actually closer to 140 million years ago. Nong Bua Lamphu, established as a province only in 1993, also has numerous prehistoric archaeological sites.

Interestingly, the very next day after I posted by GE prehistory tour online, my newspaper carried a front-page story about yet another prehistoric shellfish repository. This one is in Lampang province in the country’s North, and the newsworthiness of it lay in an administrative court yanking the mining licence granted there to the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand.

The authority is now going to have to do some serious conservation work first before it can start digging up the lignite it wants, but the safety of the 13-million-year-old snail fossils appears secure. Their remains constitute a find unique in the world, so the experts testified.

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In far eastern Isaan, the 4,000-year-old paintings of giant catfish, elephants, turtles, dogs, cows and human hands and hunting on this cliff — some stretching for 200 metres — seem almost an afterthought in the tourism promotions for Pha Taem National Park.

But the publicists might be forgiven because the park, established in 1991, also has astonishing clifftop views across the Mekong River into Laos, gorgeous waterfalls and many unusual rock formations known as Sao Chaliang.

A Silpakorn University professor and his students came across the paintings in 1981, at least 300 — more than anywhere else in the world, so it’s claimed — created over centuries and thus revealing much about the development of the people who made them.