Mongolia launched a wildlife conservation coin series in the early 1990s partly in response to international pressure over the collapsing saiga population on the Central Asian steppe — numbers had been declining sharply due to unregulated hunting following the dissolution of Soviet oversight. The series was produced under contract by a foreign mint, as Mongolia had no domestic striking capacity for refined silver issues of this specification.
The saiga antelope was classified as vulnerable by the early 1990s; it would later be uplisted to critically endangered after a series of catastrophic die-offs, including one in 2015 that killed roughly 200,000 animals in under three weeks.
Mongolia launched a wildlife conservation coin series in the early 1990s partly in response to international pressure over the collapsing saiga population on the Central Asian steppe — numbers had been declining sharply due to unregulated hunting following the dissolution of Soviet oversight. The series was produced under contract by a foreign mint, as Mongolia had no domestic striking capacity for refined silver issues of this specification.
The saiga antelope was classified as vulnerable by the early 1990s; it would later be uplisted to critically endangered after a series of catastrophic die-offs, including one in 2015 that killed roughly 200,000 animals in under three weeks.