Back with a third trilogy of coins, the Royal Mint’s ‘Tales of the Earth’ range yet again delves into our planet’s past natural history using one of the best paleo artists working today, Robert Nicholls. The first trio, issued in 2020, focused on early British discoveries by Sir Richard Owen, William Buckland, and Gideon Mantell, who began to put together the true nature of the fossilised bones.

The second trio, issued in 2021, focused on the work of the now famous Mary Anning, who dug for fossils along the Jurassic Coast in the south of England, during Victorian times. The 2024 threesome has a looser connection, choosing three of the most popular dinosaurs around the world, including the first appearance of Tyrannosaurus Rex on a British coin.

Robert Nicholls has returned to do the artwork again, and the designs all look great. The full skeleton in profile at the bottom is a nice touch, as previous coins featured just a small part of it. As before, he has used the latest research to visualise these amazing creatures. All told, a welcome return for a great series. Available today, and if you want to buy, please click the banner so we get a small commission from the mint at no cost to you. Thank you.

For better or worse, the coloured fifty pence variant will be the most prominent version in the range, again. It also enjoys the best packaging of the range, with a superb solid-block acrylic display making it easy to show off in amongst, for example, a fossil display.

Our biggest issue with this coin, and indeed with all the Royal Mint coloured fifty pence issues, is the colour itself. Many now use high-res digital colour, or even pad printing, but these are quite pixelated up close. They’re not of a low quality, but given the price these sell at (£70 for a 1/4oz), we’d like to see top quality colour applied. We haven’t seen one in hand yet, however.

Exactly the same design, just without the colour, these coins are also considerably rarer, although you would expect that in the case of the gold coin. The clean silver proof coin has a mintage just 10% of the coloured coin. Unfortunately, both of these lose the superb themed acrylic frame packaging, going with traditional Royal Mint boxes instead.

The more traditional designs, they do carry the same artwork, however. Also, the gold coin is of a greater fineness than the fifty pence, using 0.9999 gold, instead of the 0.9167 (22kt) of the 50p. The redder gold of the 50p is the result of that, with the copper making up the rest of the alloy tinting it, much like the Sovereign, and Krugerrand, for example.

The other two coins, to be released in 2024, are a pair of Jurassic Era beasts almost as well known as Tyrannosaurus Rex. Stegosaurus is known worldwide, and Diplodocus has a particular fame in the UK, as a full skeleton called ‘Dippy’, was often the first thing you saw when you entered the Natural History Museum, in London, and had resided there for 112 years. It was replaced by the skeleton of a Blue Whale in 2017, and the Dippy cast (from an original kept in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, in Pittsburgh) was moved to the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry.