In a quiet village in rural Romania, an elderly woman had been using a heavy, golden-coloured rock to hold her front door open for years. To her, it was simply a useful, albeit unusual-looking, stone. The 7.7-pound reddish rock served as a doorstop in her home in northern Romania. When burglars later broke into her house, they stole her jewellery but left the heavy stone behind, unaware that it could be worth around $1 million. After the woman died in 1991, tests revealed that the seemingly ordinary rock was actually a piece of fossilised resin dating back up to 70 million years. The “doorstop” was a 7.7-pound chunk of raw amber, making it one of the largest such specimens ever found. The valuable stone was kept lying in the house for decades.
