Nong Nooch Dinosaur Valley: what to look for

Nong Nooch Garden near Pattaya has hundreds of life-size dinosaur models. This article tells the story of its Dinosaur Valley and the real science behind the famous dinosaurs you will meet there.

How Dinosaur Valley began

Nong Nooch is a large botanical garden in Chonburi Province, near the city of Pattaya. It opened in 1980 and covers about 1,700 rai (around 270 hectares).^[1][2]

The garden's first dinosaur was a Triceratops, ordered in 2016 and placed in the Cactus Garden. Visitors loved it so much that the garden built a whole dinosaur area, which opened as Dinosaur Valley on 10 April 2017 with models of more than 180 genera.^[1]

The garden has kept adding models. In 2021 its director said there were more than 900 dinosaur statues of 320 species, and Dinosaur Valley was chosen for the Tourism Authority of Thailand's "25 Unseen New Series".^[3]

Models, not fossils

The dinosaurs at Nong Nooch are newly made sculptures, not fossils, and most of them are dinosaurs from other countries. The good part is that you can see their full size up close, which is hard to feel with a skeleton in a museum.

To see real dinosaur bones dug up in Thailand, you need to go to the Northeast: the Sirindhorn Museum in Kalasin, Phu Wiang National Park in Khon Kaen, or the dinosaur museum in Khorat. See this site's Dinosaurs of Thailand page for details.

Triceratops: the garden's first dinosaur

Triceratops lived in North America about 69–66 million years ago. It was about 8–9 metres long and had three horns: a short one on the nose and two above the eyes that could reach about 1 metre.^[4]

When you meet it in the garden, look at the mouth. Triceratops had a parrot-like beak at the front and rows of stacked teeth further back, hundreds in total, replaced throughout its life. Skin impressions show its skin was covered in large scales.^[4]

T. rex and Stegosaurus: a pair that never met

Tyrannosaurus was about 12 metres long and lived in North America at the same time as Triceratops. Skin patches found on its neck, hips and tail show small scales.^[5][6]

Stegosaurus lived much earlier, about 155–145 million years ago. The plates on its back ran in two alternating rows, not in pairs, and its tail ended in two pairs of spikes. If you see T. rex and Stegosaurus standing close together in the garden, remember that in real life they were more than 80 million years apart.^[7][15]

Raptors: smaller than you think

The real Velociraptor was about 1.5–2 metres long including the tail and weighed about 15–20 kilograms. It had feathers on its arms, based on quill knobs found in 2007.^[8][9][15]

The human-sized raptors familiar from films do not match the real Velociraptor. Read more in the article "Jurassic Park: how much of it is true?"

Megalosaurus: the first dinosaur ever named

Megalosaurus was the first dinosaur genus to get a scientific name. William Buckland named it in 1824 from bones found near Oxford, England. It lived in the Middle Jurassic, about 166 million years ago.^[10][14]

At first, scientists thought it walked on four legs like a giant lizard. Today we know it walked on two legs like other theropods, and it is estimated to have been about 6 metres long, not the 18–21 metres first suggested.^[10]

Sauroposeidon: one of the longest necks

Sauroposeidon was a sauropod from North America, about 113–110 million years ago. It was named in 2000 from four neck bones found in Oklahoma, which the person who found them first thought were petrified tree trunks.^[11][14]

With its neck raised, its head was probably about 16.5–18 metres above the ground, as high as a 5–6 storey building, making it one of the tallest dinosaurs we know.^[11]

Dilophosaurus: a lesson in looking closely

Dilophosaurus lived in the Early Jurassic. It was about 7 metres long and had two thin bony crests on its head, but there is no evidence that it had a neck frill like the one in the films.^[12]

A photo of the Dilophosaurus model in Dinosaur Valley, shared on Wikimedia Commons in 2020, is tagged as an inaccurate restoration because of its palms-down hands and its film-style frill. Those are two of the points explained in the article "How to read a dinosaur model". Take that article with you, and see which models in the garden match the latest science best.^[13]