Isaan in the flesh

Sirindhorn Museum: Southeast Asia’s largest repository of dinosaur bones.

Manote Tripathi

The Nation

 Final pieces in place, Southeast Asia's largest repository of dinosaur bones was officially opened last month by Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn. The 800 skeletons on display at the Sirindhorn Museum (aka Phu Phum Khao Dinosaur Museum) in the heart of the Isaan plateau have dwarfed 200,000 visitors since its soft opening last April.

 People are stampeding through the entrance for two reasons. First, 30 kilometres from the capital of Sahatsakhan district in Kalasin province, the museum stands right on the excavation site (down one of the district's back roads) where four species of dinosaur were discovered. Second, not far from Sirindhorn Museum is Wat Sakkawan, home to an excavated dinosaur graveyard and a pavilion displaying finds including giant leg bones and teeth. Here visitors can get up close to dinosaurs, inspecting and even touching their monstrous remains. Eerily, before the first dinosaur bone was discovered in the backyard of his temple, the previous abbot was said to have dreamed of dinosaurs.

 The Isaan Jurassic Park, as Wat Sakkawan and the museum are together known, is a treasure trove of palaeontology that looks set to become one of Asia's leading dinosaur attractions. Indeed, the temple is probably the only place in the world where visitors can play with real bones undisturbed by security guards or "don't touch" signs. Britain's famed Natural History Museum in London has nothing to compare.

 For an introduction to a time when dinosaurs ruled Thailand, the museum is the place to start. Built by the Department of Mineral Resources with a budget of Bt370 million, its wilderness location is announced by a giant sign atop a nearby hill.

 The site where the museum stands - known as Phu Khum Klao - is where the remains of seven Phuwiangosaurus Sirindhornae were found along with nearly complete skeletons of other species. Altogether, five species of dinosaur have been unearthed in Thailand, on digs in Khon Kaen's Phuwiang, Chaiyaphum, Sakon Nakhon, Udon Thani and Kalasin. The four found in Kalasin are all from the Cretaceous period - 145.5-65.5 million years ago: Phuwiangosaurus sirindhornae was a giant plant-eating Sauropod 20 metres in length; Siamotyrannus isanensis was a carnivorous Theropod; Siamosaurus suteethorni was a fish-eating dinosaur of the Carnosaurian class, seven metres in length; and Psittacosaurus sattayaraki was a metre-long herbivore living about 100 million years ago.

 The fifth species found in the Kingdom was the 16-metre-long Isanosaurus Attavipachi, a plant-eater that lived in the Triassic period about 230 million years ago, making it the oldest Sauropod.

 Life-size models of all five species' skeletons are on display in the first-floor hall along with collections of fossils from Thailand and beyond. Visitors are treated to hi-tech windows to the prehistoric world: bilingual video presentations and scenes recreating Jurassic Isaan's giant wildlife.

 The museum is divided into zones, which put dinosaurs into a bigger picture. Visitors can bone up on the genesis of life, the theory of evolution and its law of natural selection, the process of fossilisation, the birth of the dinosaurs and their classification, palaeontology and the planet's ancient ecology and geology.

 Clever presentations conjure up life on the site right from the Triassic period. It's believed that a big river once flowed over the area where the museum now stands. To find greener pastures, dinosaurs had to cross this river in a prehistoric version of the herds of wildebeest that leap into surging crocodile-infested currents we see in documentaries. The weaker ones who didn't make it got trampled and swept away by the current. Some eventually became fossilised after being buried under layer after layer of mud.

 This was probably the story of the group of dinosaurs found together three metres down at the temple's dig site: they were swept away by the currents and over time buried under a sea of mud.

 After a museum tour, a visit to Wat Sakkawan's dinosaur pavilion and dinosaur graveyard dig is a must. The place is overflowing with finds that the museum has no space for. In the temple's pavilion an old monk oversees a collection that includes giant leg and hip bones and the teeth of different dinosaur species -- some in showcases, others left out. Visitors touch the bones, and scratches show where someone has tried to uncover lucky lottery numbers.

 Each leg bone, weighing about three to five kilograms, feels like hard wood; a gentle tap brings the hollow "tok" a xylophone would make. The monk is on hand to answer questions and proffers blessings at the end of the tour without expecting a donation.

  Then it's time to inspect the dig site, where skeletons lie still embedded in the reddish part-excavated ground. Cut into the temple's grass lawn, the pit shows exactly how deep the skeletons are buried - and makes you wonder how many more lie waiting to be unearthed. The surface already seems dominated by dinosaurs, as if their spirits had been set free through the temple's rituals.

  Touring the Sirindhorn Museum and Wat Sakkawan, you realise you are literally walking in the footsteps of these prehistoric beasts, following the path they took to what is now Isaan's dinosaur graveyard.