5 Brook Wiers - 4 years ago
World-Class, Of Interest to Academic-Types and Shopping for Pearls and Rare Fossils. This collection is incredible, undoubtedly the best open to the public dealing with Indian Ocean shells. There is a self-guided tour with descriptions in Thai and English of each family of shells. I found many interesting stories, for instance that the Greek mythological golden fleece was likely from the material a large Mediterranean clam uses to bind itself to rocks. The shells are beautiful, too, so if you are with kids or have a casual interest, you could spend half an hour. Or you could spend 90 minutes as I did. The gift shop is not to be overlooked. It's huge and has a selection of top notch inexpensively priced pearls ($100-200) as well as hard to find large fossil specimens such as ammonites ($250). There are also many less expensive pieces and loose shells kids would love starting as low as 15 baht.
