5 Cents - Elizabeth II Trilobita

The Muonionalusta meteorite fell in northern Sweden roughly one million years ago and was first recovered near the Muonio River in 1906. It is a fine octahedrite, and when sliced and etched, its iron-nickel structure produces the Widmanstätten pattern — a crystalline geometry that takes anywhere from 10,000 to 1,000,000 years to form and cannot be replicated artificially. Each coin in this series is struck from an authenticated slice of that material, meaning no two pieces are identical in surface character.

Niue has issued meteorite-composition coinage under licensing arrangements that allow it to function as a legal tender vehicle for novelty scientific material. The trilobite series pairs the meteorite substrate with fossil imagery — organisms that went extinct roughly 252 million years ago, predating the meteorite's own terrestrial arrival by a considerable margin.