Minmi (1 of 4)

This is my repaint of the model of the Australian dinosaur Minmi by CollectA.

It's fair to say that that Minmi is a dinosaur that most people have probably never heard of... unless you are a dinosaur fan who also happens to live in Australia! This is because Minmi is the most complete dinosaur fossil ever to be discovered on the island continent, a cause for some celebration for dino-philes Down Under given the relative paucity (so far) of dinosaur diversity to be found here. Minmi was quite a small herbivorous dinosaur, no more than 3 metres long (including the tail) and probably standing only a metre or so tall. Minmi was one of the earliest Cretaceous representatives of the ankylosaurs, the armoured dinosaurs that went on to become much more diverse and evolve larger body sizes elsewhere in the world as the Mesozoic progressed. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Minmi is that it provides  a very rare example of a dinosaur preserved with its fossilised stomach contents, revealing that Minmi fed not only on soft foliage such as ferns, but also on seeds and berries (presumably from an early flowering plant). The image of this little dinosaur plucking berries from such a plant, and perhaps even dispersing the seeds in its dung, gives an evocative glimpse of a vanished ecology.