They say one's trash is another's treasure, but a chunk of 'rock' used to keep a door open for decades is a treasure by pretty much any metric you might care to use.
The 3.5 kilogram (7.7 pound) stone was found in a stream bed in southeast Romania by an elderly woman, who brought it home and put it to use.
Her discovery turned out to be one of the biggest intact chunks of amber in the world, according to a report by El Pais. Its value? Somewhere in the region of €1 million – around $US1.1 million.
Amber is tree resin from millions of years in the past. Over time, the highly viscous substance fossilizes into a hard, warm-hued material widely recognized as a gemstone.
In Romania, pieces of amber can be found around the village of Colti in sandstone from the banks of the River Buzau, where it has been mined since the 1920s.
Known as rumanite, this amber is famed and prized for its wide array of deep, reddish hues.
The elderly woman who found this particular rumanite nugget lived in Colti, where it remained performing a function so humble that it was missed even by jewel thieves who once targeted the home, reports say.
After the woman died in 1991, the relative who inherited her home suspected the doorstop might be more than meets the eye. On learning what he had, he sold the amber to the Romanian state, which had it appraised by experts at the Museum of History in Krakow in Poland.
According to these experts, the amber is likely between around 38 and 70 million years old.
"Its discovery represents a great significance both at a scientific level and at a museum level," Daniel Costache, director of the Provincial Museum of Buzau, told El Pais.
Classified as a national treasure of Romania, the nugget has had a home at the Provincial Museum of Buzau – the county in which the relic was found – since 2022.
The discovery resembles that of a man in Michigan, who kept a large piece of rock as a doorstop, only to find out decades later that he was keeping his doors in place with a meteorite worth $100,000.
A chunk of amber worth over a million dollars isn't a bad score, either, really. Just imagine how many doorstops you could buy.
An earlier version of this article was published in September 2024.