10 Dollars Pteranodon

Eritrea declared independence from Ethiopia in May 1993 after a 30-year war — one of Africa's longest — and almost immediately began issuing commemorative coinage, despite having no functioning central bank and no domestic mint. These early issues were produced entirely for the international collector market, struck under contract at foreign facilities, and never meaningfully circulated within Eritrea itself. The dinosaur series was a calculated move to generate hard currency through numismatic sales, a strategy common among newly sovereign or economically marginal states in the 1990s.

KM#25 belongs to a broader prehistoric fauna series issued that same inaugural year.