Treasure Facts

There are approximately three million shipwrecks on the ocean floor, worth billions in value and treasure.

In 2012, a British man named Wesley Carrington used a metal detector for the first time and found £100,000 worth of Roman gold within 20 minutes.

There are approximately three million shipwrecks on the ocean floor, worth billions in value and treasure.

A couple that were out walking on their property in Sierra Nevada discovered a canister containing $10 million in gold coins.

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 scrap dealer paid $13,302 for a gold egg at a flea market, planning to melt it for profit. Nobody wanted it. It sat in his kitchen for years. Then he Googled the name engraved inside. It was a lost Imperial Faberge egg made for Tsar Alexander III. Estimated value: $33 million.

Karl Kissner was cleaning out his late grandfather's attic in Defiance, Ohio when he found a dusty box. Inside were roughly 700 baseball cards from 1910 - including 16 Ty Cobbs and a Honus Wagner - in near-perfect condition, untouched for a century. The collection was valued at $3 million.

A California couple were walking their dog in February 2013 when the woman spotted a rusty tin can sticking out of the soil on their property. They dug it out - and found it packed with 19th-century gold coins. Eight canisters total, containing 1,427 Gold Rush-era coins dated 1847-1894. Face value: $27,980. Market value: $10 million.

A medical student from Michigan solved a decade-long treasure hunt in 2020 - finding a bronze chest filled with gold nuggets, ancient coins, and jewels that art dealer Forrest Fenn had hidden in Wyoming around 2010. More than 350,000 people had searched for it. The chest sold at auction in 2022 for $1.3 million.