1,000 Animal Coins (from 157 countries)

Today, animal coin number one thousand landed at the Coin Zoo!  It's from Greece, and features a horse being ridden by the Greek Moon Godess, Selene.

The previous day, I was in my local coin shop picking up some supplies, so of course I looked through the couple large binders of world coins. That's when I spotted this nice silver Greek coin and the best part is that I had no idea it existed. It's finds like that I really like. Of course, picking up any hard-to-find coin on my Need It list is nice, but there's something special about discovering something unexpected.

This illustrates one of the reasons a collection like this will never be "complete." When I drew up my first animal coin list back in 2005, there were just over 300 coins on it, of which I had around forty already. So, almost 25% complete! Not so fast. In those early days, all I had to do was look through coin binders and boxes at shows and I could come up with dozens of finds, of which roughly half were not on my list. (By the way, I made that list by flipping through the Krause catalogues.)

As the years went on, that happened less and less as my Need It list grew more and more. I still remember when the overall list hit the 1,000 mark, and now I have 1,000 coins which represents no more than 7 out of 10 animal coin types. So, over 400 to go. Except every year new animal coins are minted around the world.

I wouldn't have it any other way, because if it ended, then what would I collect? Ships, maybe.