Muttaburrasaurus Replica

That first-to-be-cast-and-mounted detail is easy to skate past and shouldn't be. Before Muttaburrasaurus, Australia had dinosaur fragments but no assembled skeleton anybody could stand in front of. This is the animal that gave Australian palaeontology a body.

It was a large plant-eater – an ornithopod, several tonnes, with a distinctive bulbous hollow chamber on its snout whose function is still argued about. Resonance for calls is the usual suggestion. Nobody knows.

Muttaburra is deep in central-west Queensland, a very small town a long way from anywhere, and its dinosaur is the reason most people have heard of it at all. That puts it in the same corridor as Richmond's Kronosaurus Korner, with its eleven-metre marine reptile replica outside, and Winton's dinosaur trackways – a genuine palaeontological tourism route across country that otherwise empties out.

A full-scale replica is a different proposition from most entries here. It is not exaggerating anything. The animal really was that size, and the object's job is accuracy rather than spectacle.

There is no record of an attribution, what it is made from or the date.