500 Tenge Ursus Arctos Isabellinus

The Himalayan brown bear — the subspecies depicted here — had already disappeared from much of its Central Asian range by 2008, with viable populations surviving mainly in fragmented pockets across the Tian Shan and Pamir mountain systems that straddle Kazakhstan's southeastern borders. Kazakhstan's national conservation program, which this coin was issued to support awareness of, listed the subspecies as critically threatened domestically even as international classification lagged behind ground-level population data.

Part of a broader wildlife series from the National Bank, these issues were struck in limited collector quantities and saw essentially no circulation.