Some interesting facts about Sudbury's Big Nickel on its 55th anniversary

To celebrate the 55th anniversary of the Big Nickel in Sudbury, we've compiled a short list of things you may not know about one of you favourite Sudbury landmarks.

Kelsey Rutledge, the science program specialist at Dynamic Earth, said the iconic structure weighs approximately 13,000 kilograms.

"To put it into perspective, the Big Nickel is about the same weight of your average school bus," she said. 

"It has an inner steel core and a stainless steel outer core," she added. "In order to make stainless steel, you need nickel which also prevents it from rusting."

"Which is why after 55 years it's still looking really good."

Rutledge also said the Big Nickel would be approximately the same size as a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

"That's about 64 million times the average size of your nickel that you would find in your pocket," she said.

Rutledge said there are no official statistics of how many people visit the Big Nickel, but she estimates the number sits around 100,000 tourists a year. 

"Something that people don't always know is that the Big Nickel wasn't alone," she said. "We had the Big Nickel erected first as part of the Numismatic Park. But we also had four others."

"We had the Fantasy Penny. We had a Lincoln penny. We had a Kennedy half dollar and we also had the $20 gold piece."

The Dynamic Earth Bluecoats tend to refer to the coin's sides by their numismatic names.

"When we're talking about the Big Nickel we'll accidentally use the term obverse or reverse and then have to correct ourselves and say 'heads' or 'tails' so that people know what we're talking about."

"But in numismatics, heads would be the obverse side and then the tails portion of the coin would be the reverse side."