1000 Francs CFA Brachiosaurus

The Republic of the Congo issued this piece as part of a wave of dinosaur-themed collector coins that flooded the numismatic market in the early 1990s, nearly all produced by European mints under licensing arrangements with small African nations whose names lent nominal issuing authority. The actual monetary relationship between these coins and the CFA franc zone they nominally belong to is, at best, theoretical — they were never intended for circulation and were sold directly into the collector market through wholesale distributors.

Brachiosaurus, famously, was reclassified and split from its close relative *Giraffatitan* in 2009, meaning the animal depicted no longer matches the genus name as understood by modern paleontology.