Woolly Rhinoceros 50p (2024)

There is no circulation version of the Woolly Rhinoceros 50p, so what matters is the state of a brilliant uncirculated coin and its packaging. The original Royal Mint pack, with its printed history of the species, is the form that holds the most value; capsule coins and third-party packs sell for less. Surface marks, spotting or a torn card reduce it further. The limited colour edition and the silver and gold proofs are separate products with their own prices.

The Woolly Rhinoceros 50p was not issued for circulation, so it has no rarity rank.

Look for a rhinoceros with a long front horn, its skeleton drawn in the foreground. The word COELODONTA runs along the top and WOOLLY RHINOCEROS along the bottom, with RN for the artist. The obverse portrait is of King Charles III. It sits between the Steppe Mammoth and the Giant Deer in the set, and only this coin carries COELODONTA. The plain coin and a limited colour edition were both collector issues, never released as everyday change.

Known varieties of the Woolly Rhinoceros 50p, all listed among the UK error coins and varieties:

• Colour edition: A colour-printed brilliant uncirculated edition, with an issue limit of 10,000.

Ice sheets covered huge areas during the Pleistocene, but open grassland elsewhere supported large animals, and the woolly rhinoceros was one of the biggest. It looked much like a modern rhino and was about the size of a living African white rhinoceros, at roughly two tonnes, but it had a thick coat of wool in two layers and a long, sabre-shaped front horn that may have helped it sweep snow aside to reach food. The Royal Mint made it the second of three Ice Age Giants coins in its Tales of the Earth range, after the steppe mammoth. Robert Nicholls, a palaeo-artist, created the reverse in collaboration with the Natural History Museum and palaeobiologist Professor Adrian Lister, so the animal matches the scientific evidence. A skeleton of the rhino sits in the foreground, with the genus name COELODONTA above and WOOLLY RHINOCEROS below, signed RN. Its packaging covers the Pleistocene and the history of the species.

It was one of the three coins in the Ice Age Giants set issued in 2024.