Museums Facts

A retired gardener borrowed a metal detector in 1992 to find a lost hammer in a Suffolk field. Instead, he uncovered 14,865 Roman coins and 200 pieces of ancient jewelry - the largest late Roman treasure hoard ever found in Britain, valued at £1.75 million. They found the hammer too. It's in the British Museum.

A Virginia woman bought a napkin-sized landscape at a West Virginia flea market in 2009 for $7. She wanted the plastic cow and the doll in the same box. Two years later she learned the little painting was a genuine Renoir worth $100,000. Then the FBI showed up. The museum had reported it missing in 1951.