When the rains come and the rivers swell, giant bones tend to wash up in this remote rice-farming corner of Thailand.
For years, farmers did not know what they were or what to do with them.
The superstitious buried them. Others brought them to Buddhist temples, where monks collected them alongside artifacts and other curios.
Now the message is out: Don’t throw away the dinosaur bones.
“It used to be a taboo — people didn’t want to bring them home,” said Varavudh Suteethorn, a paleontologist who has spent the last three decades leading dinosaur excavations. “After we worked for about 10 years in the area, people started to know more about it.”
Thailand is known for its beaches, great food and, more recently, its propensity for political protests, but not much for dinosaurs. It turns out that the creatures of prehistory, like the tourists of today, found certain parts of Thailand very hospitable.
Paleontologists say that the Khorat Plateau of northeastern Thailand was teeming with dinosaurs starting about 200 million years ago (Bangkok was under the sea at the time), and that the proof is in the frequency with which villagers find dinosaur bones and other fossils.
“Sometimes we discover three or four new sites with dinosaur bones in a single month,” said Preechit Phulanpree, an assistant geologist at a local dinosaur museum who was making a plaster cast of a recent discovery. “Usually we find the bones stuck in a riverbank.”
Paleontologists have documented five new genuses of dinosaurs and six previously unknown species since research began in the 1980s in partnership with French scientists. About 10,000 dinosaur bones have been collected nationwide in three decades, scientists say.
In terms of the breadth and scientific significance of discoveries, China remains a more important center for dinosaur research in Asia, according to Varavudh, but Thailand could contribute more if it had more trained paleontologists. He counts only 10 dinosaur experts in the country.
Varavudh and others hope that the younger generation will embrace the region’s dinosaur past more enthusiastically. The Sirindhorn Museum, a dinosaur museum named for Thailand’s crown princess, Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, who has shown an interest in paleontology, opened in the area three years ago, drawing about 200,000 visitors a year, many of them schoolchildren. Large dinosaur replicas have been erected along some roads here in Kalasin Province, home to the region’s most significant dinosaur discoveries.
Among the most compelling attractions are those found here in Baan Na Kum, an eight-hour drive from Bangkok past endless rice paddies and fields of sugar cane. Shrouded by jungle and accessible only by a single-lane road that winds through the hills, it is where visitors can view the giant footprints left in a riverbed by a tyrannosaur, the fierce carnivore that roamed these parts 140 million years ago. Each claw of the footprint is about the size of an average human foot.
The footprints were discovered 14 years ago by two girls, Kanlayamart Singnaklong and Patcharee Waisean, who were picnicking with their parents and set out to catch mountain crabs, an ingredient in a homemade chili sauce.
The discovery helped to raise awareness of the rich prehistoric past of what is an otherwise obscure part of Thailand.
“We thought surely this would make us famous,” said Kanlayamart, who recently completed a university degree in geology. (She is now having second thoughts about a career studying rocks and wants to travel to the US as an au pair.)
Her father, Bai Singnaklong, a schoolteacher, says he believes the girls spotted the footprints because younger generations have had more exposure to dinosaurs in school and on television.
Indeed, some young people may be too aware of the value of the region’s dinosaur legacy.
Five years ago, the US Department of Homeland Security investigated what it considered a suspicious shipment from Thailand and found instead a prehistoric bone. The US authorities contacted their Thai counterparts, who traced the parcel to a Thai man in his 20s who had set up a business buying bones from villagers and selling them on eBay.
Thai law classifies dinosaur bones as property of the state, though those who discover them are supposed to be compensated. The police arrested the man and seized more than 100 large bones and other fossils.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese