Fossils in the mud don’t always stay buried.
Not if you keep digging in the north-east of Thailand.
Scientists in Kalasin Province found a new dinosaur species.
It’s a plant-eater.
Named Uragasaurus kalasinesis, it walked the earth about 150 million years late. That’s late Jurassic time.
Its neck was absurdly long.
Think of it like this.
The dinosaur measured up to 20 meters long. Sixty-six feet.
Roughly the length of a professional cricket pitch.
Imagine an elephant-sized beast with the neck of a giraffe but the scale of a building.
Dr. Apirut Nilpanpan leads the team at Mahasarakham University.
He says the discovery comes from a fossil stash first spotted back in 2008. A local guy found bits of rock that looked like serpent scales. He didn’t know better then.
The site, called Phu Noi, is a graveyard.
More than 90% of what they dug up was dinosaur debris. Teeth. Bones. Fragments.
The key piece of evidence?
A dorsal vertebra.
That’s a back bone. From the middle or upper spine.
It looked odd.
They ran a CT scan on it.
The results placed the dinosaur in the Mamenchisauridae family.
This family is famous for two things: eating leaves and having necks that seem to defy gravity. The necks let them reach different heights of vegetation without moving their legs. Efficient? Maybe. Straining? Definitely.
Usually.
Most of these relatives come from China.
This is the first one found in Thailand.
That alone makes news.
The scan showed more than just location data. It revealed unique architecture. Specifically. The supporting bones. Called laminae.
They form a Y-shape.
There was also an air-cavity structure.
Nilpanpan called it unlike anything else on Earth.
“That’s what sets it apart”
He didn’t stay calm.
He smashed his computer.
Real talk.
Finding a new species hits different. He felt exhilarated. Then relieved.
The study just hit the pages of Nature this week.
Timing matters.
Back in May, another dinosaur came out of the Thai dirt.
The nogatitan.
A long-necked herbivore too.
But bigger.
At 27 meters long. And 27 tons.
That weighs as much as nine Asian elephants standing next to each other. It remains the largest dinosaur found in all of South-East Asia.
Now there is Uragasaurus.
Smaller.
Unique.
Found in the same soil that holds secrets we haven’t named yet.
