Here are some of the luckiest finds ever!
Wait until you hear how much whale vomit is worth!
11 - Action Comics #1 David Gonzalez was busy tearing out insulation
in his new garage.
However, as he was tearing things apart, he found a rare copy of Action Comics #1!
This was the issue where Superman was introduced to the world!
He had paid only 10 thousand dollars for the house itself.
The comic book was worth at least 15 times what he paid for the house!
Although he wasn't exactly a comic book fan, Gonzalez felt that it was valuable.
So he tracked down a collectibles trader in Tampa Bay to have the issue appraised.
But before he was able to get it appraised, his wife’s aunt kept touching the comic
book and damaged it!
So the issue got downgraded in condition from a potential 3 to a 1.5, on a 10-point scale.
But even in that condition, it was still worth a lot of money.
Around 100 copies of Action Comics #1 are thought to exist , but relatively few are
in good condition.
A near-mint copy owned by Nicolas Cage sold at auction in 2011 for a record $2.16 million
dollars!
So how much did Gonzalez’s copy end up selling for?
One hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars!
It probably would have been more if the pesky aunt didn’t keep on touching it!
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10 - Saddle Ridge Hoard An anonymous couple from California was out
walking their dog.
And all of a sudden, they happened to find a bunch of extremely rare Gold Rush-era coins
worth around 10 million dollars!
The coins are one of the greatest buried treasures ever found in the United States!
The couple decided to stay anonymous, which is a smart move.
They didn’t want a bunch of treasure hunters going on their property in Northern California’s
so-called Gold Country!
The 1,400 gold pieces were discovered buried in eight decaying metal cans on the couple’s
land.
The coins are from the mid to late 1800s, and were in nearly mint condition.
The cans were scattered across the property at different depths.
This suggested that they weren’t all put there at the same time!
The $20 gold pieces appeared to have been new when they went into the ground and had
suffered little damage from being buried for so long.
The discovery was named the Saddle Ridge Hoard.
Who knew they named treasures like they name hurricanes!
One of the coins is said to be worth at least a million dollars on its own!!
9 - Spanish Treasures In August 2015, Diver William Bartlett had
just started exploring a 300-year-old shipwreck with a metal detector.
He was in the waters of Florida’s Atlantic coast when he found his first Spanish gold
coin!
Then one coin became two coins.
And then, two coins became a lot more!
When he resurfaced with gloves full of coins, he knew they were into something super special.
Over the next two days, he and two more treasure hunters found 350 coins!
The treasure is worth around $4 and a half million dollars!
It was the most valuable find from the 1715 shipwreck site over the past few decades!
Here’s a little bit of background about the site.
Back in July of 1715, ELEVEN ships filled with treasure were heading back to Spain from
Havana, Cuba.
However, they never made it.
That’s because they encountered a hurricane off Florida’s central coast.
The winds and waves smashed the ships onto the reefs.
The shipwrecks supposedly took as many as 1,000 lives!
It was one of colonial Spain’s biggest naval disasters.
And that’s why the shipwreck site is popular with treasure hunters.
ELEVEN ships full of gold went down.
In June of the same year, a family of treasure hunters found a million dollars worth of gold
coins in the area south of this discovery.
There are supposedly still hundreds of millions of dollars worth of coins left undiscovered!
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8 - The Holy Grail Another Spanish shipwreck over 300 years old
was found in 2018.
But this one is a bit more special.
That’s because it was carrying treasure that’s estimated to be worth up to $17 billion
dollars!
The robot submarine Remus 6000 was used to discover the sunken ship.
This robot submarine can dive nearly four miles deep.
The reason why it’s so valuable is because it can dive really deep AND it’s loaded
with sensors and cameras!
The Remus 6000 found the ship almost 2,000 feet below the surface.
The presence of Bronze cannons engraved with dolphins on the ship confirmed this holy grail
of shipwrecks.
It’s the telltale sign it’s the Spanish ship San Jose, which went down in the Carribean
sea more than 300 years ago.
British warships sunk the San Jose and its crew of around 600 in 1701.
However, for now, all of the treasure still remains underwater.
AND the exact location of the wreckage is still a secret.
And the reason for that?
It’s because Colombia and Spain both say the treasure belongs to them!
7 - Caravaggio How many of us have parents who have a lot
of junk?
One man was just trying to clear out family antiques out of his attic.
But he found a painting that’s worth over two hundred million dollars!
The painting is from 1607 by the Italian master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, titled
Judith And Holofernes.
It sat for over a hundred years in anonymity in an old house.
It leaned against a wall between old clothes, family antiques, and old dishes.
The crazy thing is, thieves actually ransacked the farmhouse years ago in the city of Tolouse,
France.
They stole plenty of things, but they left behind the most valuable thing!
The painting is more commonly referred to as the “Lost Caravaggio”.
Caravaggio was born in Milan in Italy in 1571 and became one of the most famous painters
of his time.
The painting was estimated to go for around 170 million dollars!
But a private buyer bought it for an undisclosed amount right before it went to auction in
June of 2019.
6 - Whale Regurgitation
In Oman, three fishermen managed to catch something that’s….pretty gross.
They were able to catch a giant piece of whale vomit?!
This regurgitation by the whale weighed 176 pounds.
And why was this find so awesome?
Because it’s valued at almost THREE million DOLLARS Find out more about some of the most
valuable animals in the world in our video!
So, why does it have such a high price tag?
Well, it’s because whale vomit, also called ambergris, is actually a highly sought-after
ingredient in high end fragrances.
We go into a bit more detail in our “Animals worth a ton of money” video.
However, as you can probably imagine, it’s not that easy to find.
While it’s called whale vomit or ambergris, there IS debate over what the waxy substance
should be classified as.
Scientists think the substance is secreted in whale stomachs to help them bind together
objects and food they can’t digest.
After a whale produces enough ambergris, the ambergris goes out the whale’s mouth, or
it goes out the other end.
So, either way, it's pretty gross.
Once the whale has passed the ambergris, it floats on the surface of the ocean.
And that’s why one of its nicknames is 'floating gold'!
5 - Duck’s Foot
In september of 2018, A retired man found a massive gold nugget in Western Australia
believed to be worth roughly $80,000 dollars!
The man, who also did the smart move by staying anonymous, found the nugget while scanning
the area with a metal detector.
Apparently, this guy knew what he was doing.
He had been gold hunting for years already!
The man said it took him two hours to get the gold nugget out of the ground – and
when he finally weighed it, he found that it weighed approximately seven pounds.
The gold nugget was deep in the ground.
He had to dig through roughly 31 inches of clay soil.
That’s a lot of careful digging he had to do there but it obviously paid off in the
end.
The man named his lucky nugget “Duck’s Foot”, because well…..it kinda looks like
a duck’s foot?
4 - Inkalamu In October 2018, the company that’s the
world's largest producer of green stones hit a jackpot.
They found a fifty-six hundred fifty five-carat emerald crystal at its mines in Zambia!
The stone weighs almost two and a half pounds!
It got the nickname "Inkalamu," which means "lion" in the local Zambian language.
The emerald has remarkable clarity and a perfectly balanced golden green hue.
Well, that and it’s basically the size of a hamburger!
Did you know, emeralds are actually rarer than diamonds.
For this specific emerald, it was cut into pieces.
Believe it or not, this emerald actually ISN’T the largest emerald stone to be found in the
company's mines.
In 2010, miners found a 6,225-carat emerald.
That one was named “Insofu”, which means, the elephant!
3 - Hand of faith The Hand of Faith gold nugget is the biggest
gold nugget in the world!
Well, there IS a qualifier on it.
It’s the largest ever found by a metal detector.
It weighs almost 60 pounds!
It was found by husband and wife Kevin and Bep Hillier wayyy back in 1980 in Victoria,
Australia.
Kevin and his wife Bep named their find “Hand of Faith”, because of the incredible set
of circumstances leading to its discovery.
Around two weeks before the discovery, Kevin had a dream about finding a gold nugget.
His dream was so vivid, he dreamt of the nugget down to its unusual shape.
He drew it on a piece of paper and asked a friend to sign it as a witness.
Exactly two weeks later, Bep and Kevin were searching for gold when Bep heard Kevin screamin
through her metal detector headphones.
When she went over to him, he was kneeling on the ground digging around the tip of the
60-pound gold nugget!
They eventually sold it to the Golden Nugget Casino Chain for over a million dollars, where
it’s still on a public display in Louisiana!
2 - Roman gold coins
In 2018, hundreds of ancient gold coins were found in the basement of a former theater!
This was in the city of Como in northern Italy, near the border of Switzerland.
The coins date back to the late Roman Imperial times.
They were found buried in the dirt spilling out of a two-handled soapstone jar called
an amphora!
The coins have engravings of various emperors, such as Honorius, Valentinian the third, and
Leon the first.
The coins are estimated to be from around the fourth century, but no later than the
fifth century.
According to archeologists on site, the coins are priceless!
Experts agree that whoever buried the jar expected to go back for it.
They buried it in a way that in case of danger, they could go back and dig it out.
The most fascinating part is that the coins were stacked in rolls similar to how banks
stack their coins today, which hints that maybe the owner wasn’t just a single person.
The coins most likely belonged to a public bank.
1 - The Third Imperial Easter Egg An anonymous man from the midwest US paid
14 thousand bucks for a small ornament.
He had originally hoped to sell it for scrap parts and make a quick 500 bucks.
But he had overestimated how much he thought the scrap parts would bring in!
And he was too stubborn to sell the egg at a loss!
So in a fit of desperation one night, he googled "egg" and the name engraved on the clock,
"Vacheron Constantin".
His search brought up the Third Imperial Easter Egg, made by Faberge for the Russian royal
family.
And it was worth an estimated $33 million dollars!
The egg was Tsar Alexander the third's 1887 Easter gift to his wife.
However, The egg was later bought by a private collector for an undisclosed amount.
Watch this next video to find out about the most expensive materials on Earth!