Is This A Bare Belly Beaver?

Yes it is a partial bare belly!

The catalogue only identifies a Bare Belly Beaver. I have seen others break it down as Small, Medium & Large Bare Bellies though. Yours looks like a Small in my (limited) experience).

Hi kuh

I've been quite fortunate in finding these bare belly nickels, as I hung on to just about all of my nickels I got in change over the last fifteen years or so, and a couple of years ago arranged them in a sequence of sorts, ranging from those with almost no bare belly to those like the ones posted above. There must be 6 or 7 different degrees of bare bellies, with varying degrees of missing fur behind the jaw as well. What I don't know is what causes this effect -- it doesn't look like a deteriorated die, as the lines in the empty area are still quite sharp, so I'm thinking it must be tooling marks of some sort. Anyone out there who can confirm this?

Nice find, windychimes!

Hi Noah

Over-polished dies tend to be smooth in the areas that are polished, but the 1990 bare bellies have lines through the areas with no fur. There are minor bare belly beavers from the 1970's and '80's which are from polished dies, but since the 1990's have lines, they put me in mind of file marks. Saying that, if memory serves, I think there are mild bare belly 1990's which are smooth and thus would be from regular polished dies, but I'd have to dig out my set and see if I have any of those.

Yeah, that's the thing... Many other years have nice die progression sets of bare bellies, from the 1942 tombacs right up until the present time, and they're all smooth as well. But notice that the lines appear only on the beaver itself... I wonder, did they polish the die to fix some minor chipping and rather than have a big bare spot under the beaver they retooled it to fill the bare area in to blend it in? One glaring error with that theory is that there are so few bare bellies compared to regular non-bb's that it doesn't make sense. I've got to admit, I don't know, Noah.