The 'Boot of Cortez' nugget, found in 1989 in Senora, Mexico, by a local prospector with a cheap metal detector he bought from Radio Shack.
It sold at auction recently for:
$1,314,500.
The nugget weighed 389.4 troy ounces -- more than 100 ounces more than the next-biggest existing nugget, found in Alaska. (More stories about other big nuggets here.) At today's gold price per ounce ($1351.30), that works out to a little more than $526,000.
Pocket change, really.
Learn more here, via Heritage Auctions. They're having a big Ancient Coins auction today, Sept. 7.
This made me curious about the largest nugget ever found in Colorado: Tom's Baby, discovered in 1887. It originally weighed about 13 1/2 pounds -- a mere 216 ounces! You can still see the original, minus about three pounds, at Denver's Museum of Nature and Science today .
No one knows for certain where the missing gold went, in case you're wondering. (Maybe Bigfoot took it.)
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