Man almost ignored a 2.7-pound 'painted rock.' It was gold worth up to $141K
It wasn't until he scraped away the dirt that he realized that the nugget was way more valuable than he had anticipated it to be
People often discover treasure in the least expected places. In a remote area in New South Wales, Australia, an amateur fossicker spent time digging in the red soils of Mount Stuart Station. For several days, he pulled out nothing but old nails, discarded horseshoes, and other trash. In mid-October, however, his Gold Monster 2000 detector picked up a faint signal. When he dug a pit at the detection location, his hands brushed what he thought was a heavy chunk of rock lodged deep in the pit and caked with soil. The fossicker's first thought was that it was just a “painted rock," until he pulled out the chunk and scraped the dirt off it. He realized it was a 2.65-pound nugget, with about 940 g of pure gold, Perth Now reported on October 27, 2026.
A golden spud
The footage shared by @Perthnow shows a pit dug into rocky red soil. The anonymous prospector zooms into the pit and scrapes the soil to reveal a monster-sized nugget. The nugget resembles a dirt-filled potato. Weighing more than 1.218 kg (2.6852304 pounds), it was flecked with quartz and contained about 940 g (2.07235 pounds) of pure gold. The digger gave it the name “Tibooburra Spud” based on the name of the location where it was found.
The Aussie prospector had almost missed this nugget. "It wasn’t a loud signal for the size of the piece that it is, but once I got down to 100mm or something like that, the machine was squealing,” he told ABC News. “It might have been on the first or second scrape; I just saw this bright yellow dot in the center of the hole," he added. Greg Spangler, a business owner who sells prospecting supplies in Broken Hill, said he has seen only one other person find a gold nugget weighing more than a kilogram. "We have a fictitious club [called] the Ounce Club … but not many people [are] in the 'Kilo Club'," Spangler told the outlet. But these days, he said, the hobby is becoming more and more common among people. The reason probably is the surge in gold prices.
The gold rush is on
The gold prices soared to almost $8,000 per troy ounce (or 31.1 grams) in January. Now, although they have dropped, they are high compared to previous years, currently sitting at $5,700 per troy ounce. Fossicking on the Tibooburra Common is now banned, but two stations, including Mount Stuart and Gumvale, allow it for a fee, which is how this man ventured there. The area is believed to be a hot spot for gold prospectors.
As for the prospector, the discovery is worth somewhere between $150,000 and $160,000, but he believes a collector could pay as much as $200,000 for the remarkable find. Meanwhile, Spangler believes more gold is buried than it seems. "[It could] keep going forever and ever, because every time it rains, other people find gold where they didn't before," he said. So the one piece of advice the prospector has for other fossickers is to “Just keep walking, keep swinging, and keep digging every target.”
More on Scoop Upworthy
A 154-year-old U.S. law lets people ‘claim’ gold and silver underground. But there’s a catch
Share on Facebook
