A tourist from France made a remarkable 7.46-carat find during his first trip to Arkansas’ Crater of Diamonds, the park announced . Paris resident Julien Navas traveled to America along with a friend to witness the Vulcan Centaur launch in Cape Canaveral, FL. Afterward, they traveled through New Orleans, where they heard about Arkansas’ famous 37.5-acre state park. Navas had panned for gold and searched for ammonite fossils during previous vacations, so he knew he had to try his hand at diamond hunting.
“I got to the park around nine o’clock and started to dig,” Navas told Crater of Diamonds officials. “That is back-breaking work so by the afternoon I was mainly looking on top of the ground for anything that stood out.”
Almost as an afterthought, he picked up what first appeared to be a large, shiny brown rock. Only when he took his finds to the park’s Diamond Discovery Center did he realize the magnitude of his discovery. Navas was carrying a brown diamond weighing a whopping 7.46 carats. The park described his find as being “about the size of a candy gumdrop,” colored “a deep chocolate brown…and rounded like a marble.”