The design is currently available to buy (July 2020) from the Royal Mint in both a painted and unpainted brilliant uncirculated quality along with silver proof and gold proof qualities. Either side of the coin has the engraving of various fauna, possibly representing the typical plants that would have lived during the same time period. In front of the dinosaur is the jaw fragment that was found by Buckland in Oxfordshire and led to the discovery of the Megalosaurus. The design of the coin features the scary-looking dinosaur stood on its rear two feet with the engraving ‘MEGALOSAURUS’ at the top of the coin and ‘BUCKLAND 1824’ at the bottom. The Megalosaurus, whose name means ‘giant lizard’, is thought to have been a bipedal predator that roamed Britain a whopping 170 million years ago during the Middle Jurassic period. The coin’s reverse design features the impressive Megalosaurus, one of the first dinosaurs to have been discovered back in 1824 by eccentric palaeontologist William Buckland. The first of the Royal Mint’s ‘Dinosauria Collection’ to be announced was the Megalosaurus 2020 UK 50p coin, and it was released in February of 2020.
