12 years of palaeontological research in Thailand

Lektor Gilles Cuny, Statens Naturhistoriske Museum, KU

Twelve years ago, on the invitation of my former PhD supervisor, prof. Eric Buffetaut, while I was still a postdoc at the University of Bristol, I joined a team of vertebrate palaeontologists studying the Mesozoic fauna of Thailand. Since then, this collaboration has been uninterrupted, and conducted me to become a lecturer at the University of Mahasarakham for one year before becoming curator of fossil vertebrates here in Copenhagen. The development of this project saw the creation of the Palaeontological Research and Education Centre (PREC) at Mahasarakham University as well as the establishment of a palaeontological Museum, the Sirindhorn Museum at Sahatsakhan, in the Kalasin province. This is the story of this collaboration that I shall present.

The Late Jurassic – Early cretaceous of Thailand has yielded during the past 12 years a number of new dinosaurs, as well as numerous species of freshwater hybodont sharks, most of them endemic to Southeast Asia, more than 200 complete fossils of the semionotiform fish Lepidotes buddhabutrensis as well as Isanichthys palustris, a Semionotiformes that appears transitional between the Semionotidae and the Lepisosteidae, a large turtle, Basilochelys macrobios, the shell of which is reaching nearly one metre in length, and an advanced neosuchian crocodile, Khoratodus jintasakuli. This list is far from being exhaustive and just gives you an idea of the diversity of our finds.

In the late Triassic, we described in 2000 Isanosaurus attavipachi, which was at the time the first sauropod ever found in the Triassic. Last November, we located a site with temnospondyl (large amphibians of an extinct group) remains.