For decades, a modest village home in southeastern Romania held a secret from the ancient past—one that sat, unbothered, at the base of a creaky wooden door.

The elderly woman who lived there used the hefty 3.5-kilogram stone as a doorstop. The rock was plucked from a nearby stream bed in Colți, a village nestled in the Buzău Hills. It looked a bit strange, but the woman never suspected that it was anything more than a strange rock. The thieves who once broke into her house didn’t think much of it, either; they left it untouched as they ransacked her belongings and made off with a few pieces of cheap jewelry.

It would take a family member, a hunch, and a leap of curiosity to uncover the truth. Turns out, the “doorstop” was one of the largest intact amber nuggets ever discovered, worth an estimated €1 million ($1.1 million). More than just valuable, it is a rare souvenir from a world that existed up to 70 million years ago.

A Relic from the Mesozoic

Amber is not technically a mineral. It’s the hardened resin of ancient trees—once sticky, viscous sap that oozed from bark and branches during ancient days. Over millions of years, and under the right conditions, that resin fossilized into the glossy golden material we know today.

The amber found in Romania is sometimes called rumanite, a variety prized for its deep, reddish hues. It often forms in the sandstone lining the River Buzău and can contain trapped fragments of prehistoric life: insects, feathers, and even strands of animal hair.

This one doesn’t have any inclusions inside, but it’s a spectacular piece anyway.

“Its discovery represents a great significance both at a scientific level and at a museum level,” said Daniel Costache, director of the Provincial Museum of Buzău, where the chunk is now kept. Polish researchers at the Museum of History in Kraków confirmed the amber’s authenticity and dated it to between 38.5 and 70 million years old.

That makes it a relic from the late Cretaceous or early Paleogene period, when lush, resin-producing forests spanned this part of Europe.

A National Treasure, Hiding in Plain Sight

Colți, the village where the amber was found, has long been a hotspot of resin trade. Mining began there in the 1920s, and the region became so closely associated with the stone that Romanian geologist Oscar Helm gave its variety a new name: Buzău amber. The nearby Strâmba mine was once a major source of amber before the communist regime shuttered it, citing poor profitability.

The elderly woman found her specimen—likely from those same ancient deposits—in the bed of a local stream. She passed away in 1991, two years after Romania’s communist regime fell. Her house, along with the doorstop, passed to a relative. It wasn’t until years later that he began to suspect the heavy red-tinged stone might be something more.

Once it was sold to the Romanian state and evaluated abroad, the piece was declared a national treasure and returned to the Buzău Museum in 2022. There, it joins a growing collection of Romania’s amber wealth—a material that, for all its museum allure, often begins its journey as a glint in a riverbed.

In many ways, the amber’s journey mirrors stories seen elsewhere. In Michigan, for instance, a man discovered his decades-old doorstop was actually a meteorite valued at $100,000. And like that space rock, Romania’s amber holds not only monetary value, but a tangible connection to ancient times.