Phu Kum Khao
Dinosaur Fossil Site With The Sirindhorn Museum; A Large Bed Of Sauropod Bones Found Here Since The 1990s · Sahatsakhan, Kalasin
Phu Kum Khao is a low, forested hill in Sahatsakhan district of Kalasin province, in north-eastern Thailand, that turned out to hold one of the richest dinosaur bone beds in South-East Asia. In the mid-1990s, reportedly after a monk of the local temple noticed a strange bone on the hillside, palaeontologists of the Department of Mineral Resources began digging and found hundreds of fossil bones, most of them from long-necked plant-eating sauropods of the Early Cretaceous, roughly 130 million years old. Part of the dig was left in place under a roof, so visitors can look down on bones lying where they were found. Beside it stands the Sirindhorn Museum, named after Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, a large modern natural history museum with halls on the history of life, the dinosaurs of Thailand, geology and evolution, full-size skeletons and models, and a fossil research centre. It is one of the best museums in the country for children and families. The Kalasin area around it adds Phu Tai silk villages, the Lam Pao reservoir and ancient sema stones.
Sirindhorn Museum, Non Buri, Sahatsakhan, Sahatsakhan, Kalasin, 46140, Thailand
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The typical pattern: the Sirindhorn Museum and the in-situ fossil building open about 9 am to about 5 pm on weekdays, with slightly longer hours at weekends in some years, and are usually closed on Mondays, with some changes around public holidays; last entry is typically about 30 minutes to an hour before closing, and the dig building may close a little earlier than the museum. The traps that ruin a day are arriving on a Monday or a closure day, arriving in the late afternoon and finding the pit building closed before you reach it, visiting on Children's Day or a long weekend when the halls are packed, and relying on a late bus back to Kalasin. Confirm current times before relying on them.