CIT’s Winter Launch kicks off with one of our favourite subjects, the ever-classic dinosaur coin, and it’s a beauty

If you want to get in the good graces of AgAuNEWS, release a dinosaur coin, but make it a good one, and show us you actually expended some effort on its design and execution. We commented recently on how rare it is to find a Bee coin that wasn’t excellent, but the dinosaur world has not been so well served, with some real howlers over the last few years. Fortunately, and as expected, CIT have knocked it out of the park with the first in their Jurassic Relics series.

The first subject is a theropod apex predator, that lived across what is now North Africa around 100-94 million years ago. Carcharodontosaurus Saharicus was a beast similar in size to Tyrannosaurus Rex, although the latter was a heavier, stockier creature, and quite a bit more powerful. Fortunately, those two species lived around 30 million years apart, but Carcharodontosaurus did have to share its habitat with another colossal predator – Spinosaurus. It’s possible these two beasts fought, but they had mainly different diets, with Spinosaurus eschewing the flesh for a largely fish-based diet. Further down, you can see an image of two teeth. The one on the right is the tooth CIT used for the coin, and on the left, I’ve added my own Spinosaurus tooth, and the difference is clear, with its long, thin profile indicating a specialisation for holding slippery fish.

The coin itself we just handled in Berlin, and it’s even better than the images suggest. The anatomy of the animal, likely a juvenile, is first class, even showing hints of the lips it’s believed they, and other large theropods, possessed. There’s a smattering of habitat around it, and below, on the title area, is embedded a genuine piece of Carcharodontosaurus tooth. The greyscale colouring is subtle, and very well realised.

The obverse is a look back at the juvenile’s beginning, just smashing its way out of the egg, nestled in the undergrowth. A fine image by any standards, with no hint of the caricature that blights similar designs. I’m a harsh critic of prehistoric natural history coins, but I can see little to quibble about here, even if the series title ‘Jurassic Relics’ doesn’t really apply to a Cretaceous animal that missed the Jurassic by almost 50 million years. Sadly, the public perception, reinforced by the film franchise, conflates the dinosaurs with ‘Jurassic’, so it’s hard to criticise CIT, or indeed any mint, for adopting it. The coin is just terrific, and was a pleasure to see. It will come in a skin-frame with a custom insert, and the mintage of this one-ounce silver coin seems very low.

I’ll leave you with a little nugget that may blow the mind. Tyrannosaurs Rex lived closer in time to us today, than it did to the almost as famous Jurassic theropod, Allosaurus. Dinosaurs were successful…