Dinosaurs may have bowed out 65 million years ago, but they refuse to stay buried. Their bones, like half-finished sentences, keep surfacing – dragged into the present by palaeontologists and the stubbornly curious.
Thailand, not typically the first country that comes to mind when you think of ancient lizards the size of buses, is quietly rewriting that narrative. It’s not just temples and tropical fruit – beneath the soil lie secrets older than myths. The Thainosaur exhibition makes this point with a subtle kind of grandeur.
In the collective imagination, dinosaurs belong to places with wide deserts, fossilised bones half-buried in ochre earth and a cowboy holding a brush. Not Thailand. But this exhibition wants you to reconsider everything you thought you knew about this humid, noodle-filled strip of land. Because once, it was prowled by giants – real ones.
Running from now until November 2 at Museum Siam's riverside offshoot, Museum Pier, Thainosaur doesn’t just hand you a plastic dino and a souvenir sticker. It lures you back hundreds of millions of years and then kindly walks you through it all. With realism, drama and the occasional sauropod. Entry is from 10am-6pm, daily.
Here's how the journey unfolds:
- Ground floor
Forget Hollywood’s A-list reptiles – this level is all about the ancients who crawled, swam or slithered before the dinosaurs took over. Here you'll meet Isanosaurus, an early sauropod who, quite frankly, doesn’t get enough attention. Fossils are real, labels are legible, and the sense of time collapsing is pleasantly overwhelming. - Second floor
The heart of the exhibition, and where things begin to feel like a fever dream from Natural History GCSE. Towering reconstructions of Chalawan thailandicus (an eight-metre crocodile, in case you needed nightmares), plus the celebs of the Thai dino world – Siamotyrannus, Phuwiangosaurus, Kinnareemimus, and Siamosaurus. If you’re not saying these names aloud by the time you leave, did you even go? - Third floor
Here, extinction plays out in bones and beautifully tragic backstory. Siamraptor and other Thai-origin fossils are displayed in both original and replica form, curated with care and a quietly theatrical sense of finality. But it’s not all death – prehistoric sharks, crocodiles and elephants make cameos, alongside surprisingly accurate animations mimicking their ancient movements.
And just as you begin to question the point of returning to the present day, contemporary artworks step in. Inspired by these ancient beasts, the pieces straddle science and story, fossil and feeling.
Running from now until November 2 at Museum Pier. Thai visitors pay B150 for children and B250 for adults, while foreign guests are charged B250 for children and B350 for adults.