Largest gold nugget ever found

What to remember

On 5 February 1869, at Moliagul in Victoria, Australia, two Cornish miners, John Deason and Richard Oates, found a nugget lying just 3 cm below the surface, near the base of a tree. The Welcome Stranger weighed 78.4 kg, and no larger gold nugget has been found.

It was an alluvial nugget. Its gross weight was 2,520 troy ounces and its net weight 2,284 troy ounces, or 71.0 kg. It measured 61 cm wide and 31 cm long. The site lies about 14 km northwest of Dunolly.

Very large nuggets tend to share the same fate: most were melted down into ingots, so their size and mass are known only from historical records. Three of the biggest nuggets on record come from the Serra Pelada mine in Brazil.