Jurassic Park Revisited

If we never dinosaurs bones were ever dug up, no one would ever believe they existed. For that reason my love of dinosaurs has extended past my childhood fantasy of monstrous reptiles roaming the earth, only to fight each other and eat the loser in one huge Jurassic battle royale. And today, living only kilometers away from a real “Jurassic Park” I had to satiate my curiosity and go what all the fuss was about.

The park was only an hour drive away and is half museum, and half wat. The parking lot was empty despite small groups of people walking up a path towards the site, casually looking at the cheap dinosaur key chains out for sale. We could hear monks chanting for those who came to make merit at the wat but we skipped straight to the museum. Outside the entrance there were the classic cutouts that each of us stood behind, poking our heads out of the holes pose for a picture as a stegosaurus or T-Rex.

I still can’t put my finger on what it was about the “museum” but looking down at the main exhibit from above, the brontosaurus bones still imbedded in rock looked so unimpressive that instead of marveling at their age beyond hundreds of millions of years, I couldn’t help but think that the mountain they were stuck in was at least the same age, maybe older. Well, that and the fact that it was a vegetarian dinosaur and not something cool with sharp claws, huge teeth, or large plates jutting out of its back.

The site’s lack of carnivorous jaws aside, it was all a lack of context, I suppose. Though there were English translations on all the exhibits it was dry and uninformative like an elementary textbook. Even the bones themselves weren’t big enough to be impressive. If I hadn’t known any better, I could have mistaken them for the remains of a large buffalo or an elephant. This depiction of how the dinosaur must have laid dead some 130 million years ago helped me to have some connection to what I was looking it, but still what I wanted to see was a movie showing it being hunted down and killed by the jaws of a T-Rex. Or a pack of saber-tooth tigers.

Quickly bored the exhibit I resorted to what the Thais were doing, having fun trying to flip one Baht coins into the spittoon on the ground below the deck for good luck. (This time I finally got one in and I’m patiently awaiting some good luck coming my way.)

All is not lost for Isaan’s Jurassic Park though. A new museum is currently being built aside the mountain (hill) the where initial bones were found. In “HOLLYWOOD” style, large Thai letters spell out the museum’s name and underneath the sign sits the most modern building all of Isaan.

Still unfinished, the park isn’t fully open to the public yet but we got to peek in and see a preview. I couldn’t get a great look at all of it, but from what I did see it looks like they did a good job the second time around, this time displaying to-scale replica skeletons of all the cool, carnivorous dinosaurs that we love and even have a pterodactyl hanging from the ceiling (how the hell did something that big fly, anyways?).

Already too bored to have the glance at the un-open museum to perk up my imagination again, I was ready to go home. I did however think back to my favorite dinosaur museum back at home, The U of M Natural History Museum, a modest place in itself, and marveled at all the great times it had brought me when I was young. At least their saber-tooth tiger and T-Rex that is. Still, when this new museum opens I imagine the Thai kids will walk through it with as much amazement as I did back in Ann Arbor, and will most likely be begging their parents to buy them some of those cheesy dinosaur souvenirs that weren’t selling so well the day we went.