1 Dollar Sea Turtle

Palau began issuing dollar-denomination collector coins in the late 1990s under licensing arrangements common among small Pacific island states with limited domestic monetary infrastructure — the coins are legal tender in name but were never intended for circulation. The sea turtle series specifically tracked growing international interest in marine conservation coinage, a niche that Pacific issuers exploited aggressively through the early 2000s.

KM#124 is a copper-nickel issue in a series that also produced silver variants; the two are sometimes conflated in dealer listings.