10 Tala - Tanumafili II Flying Bat

Tanumafili II held the position of O le Ao o le Malo — head of state of Samoa — from independence in 1962 until his death in 2007, making him at the time of this coin's issue the world's longest-serving head of state. The flying fox depicted on this issue belongs to the genus Pteropus, native to Samoa and integral to local forest ecology as a pollinator. Samoa issued a run of wildlife-themed silver coins through the 1990s targeting the collector market, produced to fund government revenue rather than for any domestic circulation purpose.