I did some research on the picture of the wasp with the mercury dime last night when I also noticed how odd that was.
It’s originally from National Geographic, and the photographer’s name was Paul Zahl and he worked for National Geographic between 1949 and 1978, and that explains the super cool old dime since they we still in circulation for many of those years. (After the US discontinued silver coins in 1964, they became increasingly difficult to find, but Mercury Dimes were still fairly common prior to that.)
Ohhh! If it were pre-1965 it would totally explain it, as you said!
Fun fact: so ~20 years ago I worked in a coin shop, and I’ve gone through multiple bank bags of quarters ($500, or 2000 quarters) and in all the time I had done that I have literally only found a single silver quarter in all of them (you can tell because of the date and the fact that they do not have the bi-metallic edge like nickle-clad copper does.)
And yeah! There was a whole bunch of baiscally illegal activity after silver got expensive and removed from coinage where people would basically melt down silver coinage into ingots and then smuggle them around so they could sell it for the value of silver