100 Francs Shoebill

Rwanda's National Bank has issued a long-running series of gold coins featuring African wildlife, and the shoebill — a prehistoric-looking wading bird native to the swamps of central and eastern Africa, including Rwanda's own Akagera wetlands — is among the more unusual subjects in that series. The bird's taxonomic history is itself contested; classified variously with herons, storks, and pelicans before landing in its own monotypic family, Balaenicipitidae.