5 Chervontsev Urile Perspicillatus

The "Urile Perspicillatus" of the title is the spectacled cormorant — Pallas's cormorant, formally — a flightless seabird native to Bering Island that was hunted to extinction by 1850, roughly 70 years after Georg Wilhelm Steller first described it in 1741. This coin belongs to Moscow Mint's ongoing Red Book series, which has issued collector pieces tied to Russia's federal list of endangered and extinct species since the early 1990s. The chervonets denomination itself is a deliberate revival, historically a gold ten-ruble unit; its use here is purely nominal.