The fateful day the death knell rang for the dinosaurs is brought to life on the Germania Mint’s outstanding new coin

One of the biggest success stories in the bullion market in recent years, the Germania Mint has constructed a superb range of issues, mainly built around the semi-historical nation it’s named after. While there’ve been a few proof versions of those bullion designs, it’s only recently that they’ve expanded further into more overt partnerships with others to produce some quite exquisite coins, like the Knight of the Past for Malta, and the recent Notre Dame with Numiartis. Now they’ve dived into two favourites of ours in a single coin – dinosaurs and meteorites.

This is straight up a super coin. The Triceratops in the foreground is beautifully textured and looks spot-on for anatomy and pose. Colour can often be a coin’s Achilles heel, but the dark and foreboding volcanic panorama of destruction in the background is a fine setting for the scene. The slice of Muonionalista meteorite is embedded into the coin as if it had carved a swathe of carnage on its way. It’s been postulated that the asteroid strike may have been the final straw after centuries of increased volcanic activity, so it works on many levels.

The obverse carries on with the same colour palette, and the meteorite fragment is equally prominent here, but this is clearly a much later scene. Timmy the Triceratops is now shown post-barbecue, next to something that may possibly be even more ancient, Queen Elizabeth II… Again, it looks great, although we’d like to have seen the dinosaur skeleton part buried in the rock for that bit of added depth. All told, a superb coin that these images don’t do full justice to. Fortunately, we have a sample coin in house and our next post will be filled with some close-up shots, so you can see all the detail that the coin has been imparted with.

A quick nod to the coins’ presentation. It’s one of the best we’ve seen. A double-sided acrylic frame on a wooden base, replete with fossil etching, shows off the coin perfectly. This would make a great centrepiece to a fossil display, for example, A two-ounce 0.9999 silver piece, it has a mintage of just 777 pieces, and was produced in partnership with Numizzmi. Hopefully, this is the first of many to come from the collaboration, if this standard is what we can expect. A terrific release, highly recommended.

THE CHICXULUB CRATER

The Chicxulub crater is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its centre is located offshore near the communities of Chicxulub Puerto and Chicxulub Pueblo, after which the crater is named. It was formed when a large asteroid, about 10 kilometers in diameter, struck the Earth. The date of the impact coincides precisely with the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (commonly known as the “K–Pg boundary”), slightly more than 66 million years ago, and a widely accepted theory is that worldwide climate disruption from the event was the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction in which 75% of plant and animal species on Earth became extinct, including all non-avian dinosaurs.

The crater is estimated to be 150 kilometers in diameter and 20 kilometers in depth, well into the continental crust of the region of about 10–30 kilometers in depth. It is the second-largest confirmed impact structure on Earth, and the only one whose peak ring is intact and directly accessible for scientific research. In 2016, a scientific drilling project drilled deep into the peak ring of the impact crater, hundreds of meters below the current sea floor, to obtain rock core samples from the impact itself. The discoveries were widely seen as confirming current theories related to both the crater impact and its effects. (Wikipedia)

MUONIONALUSTA METEORITE

The Muonionalusta meteorite is one classified as fine octahedrite, type IVA (Of) which impacted in northern Scandinavia, west of the border between Sweden and Finland, about one million years BCE. Studies have shown it to be the oldest discovered meteorite impacting the Earth during the Quaternary Period, about one million years ago. It is quite clearly part of the iron core or mantle of a planetoid, which shattered into many pieces upon its fall on our planet. Since landing on Earth, the meteorite has experienced four ice ages. It was unearthed from a glacial moraine in the northern tundra, and has a strongly weathered surface covered with cemented faceted pebbles.

The first fragment of the Muonionalusta meteorite was found in 1906 near the village of Kitkiöjärvi. Around forty pieces are known today, some being quite large. Other fragments have been found in a 25-by-15-kilometre area in the Pajala district of Norrbotten County, approximately 140 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. The meteorite was first described in 1910 by Professor A. G. Högbom, who named it after the nearby place Muonionalusta on the Muonio River. (Wikipedia)