10 Won Brontosaurus

North Korea issued a series of aluminum collector pieces in the mid-2000s targeting the foreign numismatic market rather than domestic circulation — hard currency generation, not monetary policy. The brontosaurus issue belongs to that wave, timed loosely to coincide with international interest in paleontological themes following high-profile dinosaur exhibition tours across East Asia.

Worth noting: taxonomically, "Brontosaurus" was considered a synonym of Apatosaurus from 1903 until a 2015 cladistic study rehabilitated it as a distinct genus — meaning this coin was struck while the name on it was technically considered invalid by the scientific community.