500 Rupiah Chalcosoma caucasus

Part of Indonesia's 2016–2017 fauna series, this issue belongs to the first major redesign of Indonesian circulating coinage in roughly two decades. The series replaced the long-running New Rupiah types and was phased into circulation gradually, meaning early-dated pieces from 2016 saw far wider distribution than the 2017 strikes before public familiarity with the new types had fully taken hold.

Chalcosoma caucasus, the Caucasus beetle, is native to the forests of Southeast Asia — Indonesia among its core range — giving the subject genuine biogeographic relevance to the issuing country rather than the token exoticism sometimes applied to fauna coinage.