They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, but a piece of ‘rock’ used to hold a door open for decades is a treasure by almost anyone’s standards.
A woman discovered a 3.5-kilogram (7.7-pound) stone in a stream bed in southeastern Romania, brought it home, and used it as a door.
His find is one of the largest intact pieces of amber in the world, according to a report the country.
Its value? Somewhere in the region of €1 million – about US$1.1 million.
Watch the video below for a summary:
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Related: Man Holds Rock For Years, Hoping It’s Gold It turned out to be very valuable.
In Romania, pieces of amber can be found around Kolti village In sandstone from the banks of the Buzau River, where it has been mined since the 1920s.
Known as rumanite, this amber is famous and valued for its wide range of deep, red colors.
The elderly woman who found this particular rumaniite nugget lived in Kolti, where it has been putting on such a modest show that even jewel thieves who once targeted the house missed it, reports say.
After the death of the woman in 1991, the relatives who came to the house suspected that the door of the house might have fallen due to blind eyes.
After realizing what he had, he sold the amber to the Romanian state, which was appraised by experts at the History Museum in Krakow, Poland.
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According to these experts, amber can be around 38 to 70 million years old.
“Its discovery represents great importance both at the scientific level and at the museum level,” said Daniel Costache, director of the Provincial Museum of Buzau. the country.
Classified as a national treasure of Romania, since 2022 the nugget has been housed in the Provincial Museum of Buzău – the county in which the remains were found.
The discovery is similar to that of a Michigan man who placed a large piece of rock as a door, only to discover decades later that he had placed his door with a meteorite worth $100,000.
A piece of amber worth over a million dollars isn’t a bad score, either, really. Imagine how many doors you can buy.
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Amber is the resin of a tree For millions of years in the past. Over time, the highly viscous material fossilizes into a hard, dark-colored material that is widely recognized as a gemstone.
Above ground, tree resin can act like a sticky trap, collecting impressively intact samples of invertebrate populations for us to study millions of years later.
Although it is quite common in the northern hemisphere, amber has only been discovered sporadically in the southern half of the planet.
During the Barremian period, about 122 million years ago, large amounts of resin were produced by coniferous trees around the world, which ruled all plants until about 70 million years ago.
An incredible, 112-million-year-old amber recently discovered in Ecuador’s Genoveva mine has preserved at least five insects, including a variety of flies, fungus beetles, wasps and caddisflies.
It also caught evidence of arachnid activity in the form of fragments of spider webs. The way the strands are oriented indicates that the web may have been made in the style of modern orb-weavers, although it lacks the sticky drops of these types of webs.
“These findings provide direct evidence of a moist, resinous forest ecosystem and its arthropod fauna in equatorial Gondwana during the Cretaceous resinous interval,” paleobiologist Javier Delclos of the University of Barcelona and colleagues explained in their paper published in September.
RELATED: Venus Flytrap Wasp: 99-Million-Year-Old Amber Reveals Strange New Species
In 2024, scientists from Germany and the UK discovered amber for the first time in West Antarctica – the fossilized ‘blood’ of ancient coniferous trees that once grew on Earth’s southern continent between 83 and 92 million years ago.
Along with fossils of roots, pollen and spores, the find provides some of the best evidence that a Middle Cretaceous, swampy rainforest existed near the South Pole and that this prehistoric environment was “dominated by conifers”, similar to today’s forests in New Zealand and Patagonia.
“Now our goal is to learn more about the ecosystem of the forest – if it burns, if we can find traces of life in the amber,” said marine geologist Johann Klages of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.
“This discovery allows travel to the past in yet another direct way.”
Thanks to the magic of amber, there are even some ancient tardigrades that have been preserved for millions of years.
An earlier version of this article was published in September 2024.
