The world's most famous gold nuggets

How gold nuggets form

Nuggets start out in solid rock, in what geologists call lode deposits. Over time, erosion and decay break that rock apart.

Gold is extremely resistant to weathering, so it survives the process. According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), once it's freed from the rock, streams carry it downhill as dust, flakes, grains or nuggets. That's how placer deposits form: concentrations of gold in sand and gravel, sorted by gravity.

Weight does the sorting. Gold as it's found in nature has a density of 16 to 18, while the surrounding rock is about 2.5. So gold sinks. During floods, when a stream's whole bed of sand, gravel and boulders is moving, gold works its way down and often ends up on or near bedrock. Concentrations of gold in gravel are called "pay streaks."

Nuggets aren't pure gold, either. Gold in nature is commonly mixed with other metals, such as silver and copper. The USGS gives the example of a nugget with 885 parts gold and 115 parts other metals, which would be called 885 fine.

The famous finds at a glance

Old records don't always agree on weights, so where sources differ, we've said so.

Victoria's giants

Victoria, in southeastern Australia, is nugget country. Its goldfields have produced some of the biggest nuggets ever recorded.

The Welcome Nugget, 1858

On June 9, 1858, a group of 22 Cornish miners working the Red Hill Mining Company site at Bakery Hill, in Ballarat, found a nugget weighing 68.98 kg. Geoscience Australia calls it the second-largest gold nugget ever found. The Argus newspaper said at the time that it had "a grotesque resemblance to a skeleton horse's head and shoulders."

The Welcome Stranger, 1869

On February 5, 1869, Cornish miner John Deason was searching around the roots of a tree in Bulldog Gully, near Moliagul in central Victoria. Just 3 cm below the surface, he found the biggest gold nugget ever discovered: the Welcome Stranger. His partner, Richard Oates, shared in the find.

Records differ on its exact weight. Museums Victoria gives 66 kg, Geoscience Australia 70 kg, and State Library Victoria 2,332 ounces, or more than 70 kg. Whatever the exact figure, it remains the largest nugget on record.

Afterwards, Deason went back to Moliagul, and his descendants are still in the area. Oates returned to Cornwall.

The Hand of Faith, 1980

Big finds didn't end in the 1800s. In September 1980, Kevin Hillier found the Hand of Faith near the small town of Kingower, in Victoria. He used a metal detector. The nugget weighs 875 troy ounces, or 27 kg.

It was later sold for more than a million dollars to a Las Vegas casino, which put it on display in its lobby.

The Holtermann specimen, 1872

At 2 a.m. on October 19, 1872, miners in the Star of Hope mine on Hawkins Hill, at Hill End in New South Wales, broke into something extraordinary. It weighed 285 kg in all, gold plus quartz and slate, and held 93.2 kg of gold. That's 3,000 troy ounces.

It's often called the Holtermann Nugget, after mine manager Bernhardt Holtermann, who got much of the credit along with syndicate member Louis Beyers. The Australian Museum points out two surprises. First, it wasn't really a nugget. It was a mass of gold and rock broken from a quartz reef, which miners call a specimen. Second, Holtermann didn't find it himself. He had ordered the shaft dug straight down. On the advice of experienced miners Moses Bell and William Hunt, syndicate member Mark Hammond went against those orders and dug westward instead, and that's where the gold was found.

The Australian Museum calls it the largest single mass of gold ever found. You can't see the real thing, though. Soon after it was found, it was crushed in a stamper battery and melted down for its gold. The fortune it brought Holtermann paid for a mansion in Sydney.

Pepita Canaã, Brazil

The largest nugget ever found in Brazil came from the Serra Pelada gold diggings, in the state of Pará. According to the Central Bank of Brazil, which displays it, it weighs 60.82 kg and contains 52.33 kg of gold. Known as the Pepita Canaã, it's the great attraction of the collection at the bank's Museu de Valores, the Museum of Values.

Unlike the Holtermann specimen, the Pepita Canaã was never melted down. It's still part of the museum's collection.

Canada's nuggets and the Klondike

Canada's most famous gold story is the Klondike. In mid-August 1896, George Carmack, Keish (Skookum Jim Mason) and Káa Goox (Dawson Charlie) found gold on Rabbit Creek, a small stream feeding the Klondike River. It was soon renamed Bonanza Creek. Read the full story on our Klondike Gold Rush page.

The Klondike is placer country, the kind of stream gold described above. The Government of Yukon says more than 20 million ounces of gold have been recovered from the Klondike placer district, and mining there is still going on.

Some of that gold has a direct link to the discovery. Nuggets that once belonged to Keish (Skookum Jim) were donated to the MacBride Museum in Whitehorse.

British Columbia has a record holder of its own. In 1937, Alice Shea found a nugget while walking along a creek to her husband's claim near the Turnagain River, in northern BC. It weighs 1,642 grams, or 52 troy ounces. Her husband, Vern Shea, sold it to the BC government that year for $1,500. The Royal BC Museum calls it the largest existing gold nugget found in the province, and it's one of the museum's prized gold rush pieces.

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