5 Dollars Sea Turtle

Palau's early silver issues from the late 1990s were produced under a licensing arrangement that outsourced both design and minting to foreign facilities — a common arrangement for the island nation, which gained full independence only in 1994 and had no domestic mint infrastructure whatsoever. The 1998 marine series drew directly on Palau's constitutional mandate to protect its marine environment, enshrined in a provision that makes it one of the few nations in the world with ecological protection written into its founding legal document.