Its value? Somewhere in the region of \u20ac1 million \u2013 around US$1.1 million.<\/p>\n
Watch the video below for a summary:<\/p>\n
![\"YouTube](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/1765293488_998_0.jpg\")
frameborder=”0\u2033 allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen><\/p>\n
Related: Man Keeps Rock For Years, Hoping It’s Gold. It Turned Out to Be Way More Valuable.<\/a><\/p>\n In Romania<\/a>, pieces of amber can be found around the village of Colti<\/a> in sandstone from the banks of the River Buzau, where it has been mined since the 1920s<\/a>.<\/p>\n Known as rumanite<\/a>, this amber is famed and prized for its wide array of deep, reddish hues.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n After the woman died in 1991, the relative who inherited her home suspected the doorstop might be more than meets the eye.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n According to these experts, the amber is likely around 38 to 70 million years old.<\/p>\n “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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Classified as a national treasure of Romania, the nugget has had a home at the Provincial Museum of Buzau \u2013 the county in which the relic was found \u2013 since 2022<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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>.<\/p>\n A chunk of amber worth over a million dollars isn’t a bad score, either, really. Just imagine how many doorstops you could buy.<\/p>\n Amber is tree resin from millions of years in the past<\/a>. Over time, the highly viscous substance fossilizes<\/a> into a hard, warm-hued material widely recognized as a gemstone.<\/p>\n Above ground, tree resin can act like a sticky trap, collecting impressively intact<\/a> specimens of the invertebrate population<\/a> for us to study millions of years later.<\/p>\n Though it is fairly common in the Northern Hemisphere, amber has only been discovered intermittently in the southern half of the planet.<\/p>\n During the Barremian period, around 122 million years ago, massive amounts of resin were formed by coniferous trees<\/a> around the world, which reigned over all plants until about 70 million years ago.<\/p>\n Incredible, 112-million-year-old amber recently found at the Genoveva quarry in Ecuador<\/a> has preserved at least five orders of insects, including a variety of flies, a fungus beetle, wasps, and a caddisfly.<\/p>\n It also caught evidence of arachnid activity, in the form of a fragment of spider web. The way the strands are oriented suggests the web may have been built in the style of modern orb-weavers<\/a>, though it lacks the sticky droplets typical of these kinds of webs.<\/p>\n “These findings provide direct evidence of a humid, resinous forest ecosystem and its arthropod fauna in equatorial Gondwana during the Cretaceous Resinous Interval,” paleobiologist Xavier Delcl\u00f2s from the University of Barcelona and colleagues explain<\/a> in their paper, published in September.<\/p>\n Related: Venus Flytrap Wasp: 99-Million-Year-Old Amber Reveals Bizarre New Species<\/a><\/p>\n In 2024, scientists in Germany and the UK discovered amber in West Antarctica for the first time<\/a> \u2013 the fossilized ‘blood’ of ancient coniferous trees that once grew on Earth’s southernmost continent between 83 and 92 million years ago.<\/p>\n Along with fossils of roots, pollen, and spores, the finding provides some of the best evidence yet that a mid-Cretaceous, swampy rainforest existed near the South Pole, and that this prehistoric environment was “dominated by conifers<\/a>“, similar to forests in New Zealand<\/a> and Patagonia<\/a> today.<\/p>\n “Our goal now is to learn more about the forest ecosystem \u2013 if it burned down, if we can find traces of life included in the amber,” said<\/a> marine geologist Johann Klages from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.<\/p>\n “This discovery allows a journey to the past in yet another more direct way.”<\/p>\n![\"Win](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Space-Comp-mid-article-promo-last-chance-final-642x273.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"YouTube](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1764288784_173_0.jpg\")
frameborder=”0\u2033 allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen><\/p>\n![\"Resin](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/TreeResinFormingAmber642.jpg\")
Resin forming under the damaged branch of a tree. (KevinDyer\/Canva<\/a>)<\/p>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/AntPreservedInAmber642.jpg\")
An ant inside Baltic amber<\/a>. (Anders L. Damgaard\/CC BY-SA 4.0\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a>)<\/p>\n