Recently, I became aware that the Royal Australian Mint started issuing a series of 1 oz. bullion coins in 2019 that featured different species of dolphins. There is a new species every year. First was the bottlenose; in 2023, it’s the rough-toothed. Nice looking coins; see the pics. Every year, there are minted 250 gold AU$100 coins and 25,000 silver AU$1 coins as business strikes. There are also 1,000 silver proofs minted with the design the same as the regular strike coins, but higher relief along with the proof planchet and strike. When I first learned of the proof coins, I assumed they would also be AU$1. Nope, they are AU$5! So, I looked at the PCGS pop report to see how many silver proofs had been certified for 2019-2022 coins. In the pop report, PCGS does not give the dolphin coins their own group. Instead, they are lumped in the huge category of “Decimal Coinage”. And this is where data mayhem exists. For 2020-2022, everything seemed OK. Searched “dolphin” under $5 proof coins and came up with pops of 139, 121 and 100 for the three years. Almost all are PR70DCAM. Rather remarkable that 10% or more of the mintages of each of those years made it into PCGS holders. But 2019 was not to be found. eBay to the rescue. Figured with that many coins certified, some should be on eBay including the 2019. And I found one with numbers on the label of 800583.70/384022848. So, I entered the cert. no. on the PCGS website. And yep, the coin is there with a grade of PR70DCAM and matching type no. of 800583. Pop in PR70 was listed as 50. If I click on the type number, the main heading states the type is a $5 silver proof, but the subheading says it’s in the Kangaroo/Nugget/$5 gold group! If I click on the pop. number of 50 on the verification page, I’m taken to the Kangaroo/Nugget/$5 gold group. And if I search for dolphin here, yup, I find the 2019 silver proof. But the pop is 10, not 50, and there is a new type no. of 800581. If I click on that type number, I go to yet another page for silver $5 proofs (but still under the subheading Kangaroo/Nugget/$5 gold). OK, you get the idea. There’s a saying that folks screw-up, but if they want to do a really good job of it, they need a computer. So, if you want to look at the pic below and go, great! But there’s more. When I originally thought the proofs would be $1 face like the business strikes, I tried to search PCGS pop report for $1 proofs between 2019-2022 with keyword of “dolphin”. And I found one! Type number 809054 with only 3 coins in it …. 2020 spinner dolphin coins but no pics. This coin should not exist. Maybe a few folks sent in business strikes that looked like proofs, put proof on the form, and PCGS went along with it. Maybe they’re patterns that managed to escape into the wild. Maybe mules with a proof planchet, proof dolphin die but the queen side, which has the denomination, being the business strike die. Who knows? And yeah, I’ll forward this info to PCGS. Cal
When it comes to some of these world coins, PCGS and NGC have been known to do strange things. Some coins get stuck into random categories or even the same series is placed in different areas. The MS vs PR distinction can also be messed up. Another thing to be aware of is that different labels could have there own population (so you might see a population of 50 under the standard label and another 10 under some special Australian Flag label...just as an example, not necessarily what happened in the instance you described).
