They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, but a “rock” used to keep a door open for decades is a treasure by almost anyone’s standards.
A woman found the 3.5kg (7.7lb) stone in a riverbed in southeastern Romania, took it home and used it as a doorstop.
Her discovery turned out to be one of the largest intact blocks of amber in the world, according to a report national newspaper.
What’s it worth? About 1 million euros – about $1.1 million.
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RELATED: Man kept rock for years hoping it was gold It turns out to be more valuable.
In Romania, one can find fragments of amber lying around. corti village The sandstone originates from the banks of the Buzau River and has been mined since the 1920s.
Known as Lumanite, this type of amber is famous and highly prized for its various deep red shades.
The old woman who discovered this particular Luman stone reportedly lives in Corti, where it still plays such an inconspicuous role that even jewel thieves who once targeted the residence ignored it.
After the woman died in 1991, relatives who inherited her home suspected that the doorstop might not be what it seemed.
After learning what he had, he sold the amber to the Romanian government, and it was authenticated by experts from the Historical Museum in Krakow, Poland.
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According to these experts, the age of the amber may be approximately 38 to 70 million years.
“Its discovery is of great significance both at a scientific level and at a museum level,” said Daniel Costache, director of the Buzau Provincial Museum. national newspaper.
The nugget is classified as a national treasure of Romania and has been housed in the Buzau Provincial Museum (where the artifact was found) since 2022.
The discovery is similar to a man in Michigan who used a large rock as a doorstop, only to discover decades later that he had used a $100,000 meteorite to secure the doorstop.
A piece of amber worth over a million dollars is certainly a good score, too. Imagine how many doorstops you could buy.
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Amber is resin from millions of years ago. Over time, this highly viscous substance turns into a hard, warm-toned material widely considered a gemstone.
On the ground, the tree resin acts like a sticky trap, collecting impressive samples of intact invertebrates for us to study millions of years later.
Although amber is fairly common in the northern hemisphere, it is only found intermittently in the southern half of the planet.
During the Baliem period, about 122 million years ago, coniferous trees around the world formed large amounts of resin, which dominated all plants until about 70 million years ago.
Incredible 112-million-year-old amber was recently discovered at the Genoveva quarry in Ecuador, which preserved at least five orders of insects, including various flies, fungus beetles, wasps and caddisflies.
It also captured evidence of spider activity in the form of web fragments. The way the threads are oriented suggests that the web may have been built in the style of modern sphere weavers, although it lacks the sticky droplets typical of such webs.
“These findings provide direct evidence for the existence of a moist resin forest ecosystem and its arthropod fauna in equatorial Gondwana during the Cretaceous resin period,” Xavier Delclòs, a paleontologist at the University of Barcelona, and colleagues explained in a paper published in September.
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In 2024, German and British scientists discovered amber in West Antarctica for the first time, which is the “blood” fossil of ancient conifers that once grew on the earth’s southernmost continent 83 to 92 million years ago.
In addition to fossilized roots, pollen and spores, the discovery provides some of the best evidence yet that mid-Cretaceous swampy rainforest existed near Antarctica, and that this prehistoric environment was “dominated by conifers” similar to forests in New Zealand and Patagonia today.
“Our goal now is to understand more about the forest ecosystem – whether we could find traces of life in the amber if it burned,” said marine geologist John Klages of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.
“This discovery allows us to travel back in time in another, more direct way.”
There are even some ancient tardigrades that have been preserved for millions of years thanks to the magic of amber.
An earlier version of this article was published in September 2024.