Newly Found $20M Diamond Is Size of a Credit Card

404.2-carat diamond thought to be 27th largest ever found
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 16, 2016 7:15 AM CST
Newly Found $20M Diamond Is Size of a Credit Card
It's 404.2 carats.   (ASX)

One of the largest diamonds ever recorded has been pulled from the ground in Angola. Australia's Lucapa Diamond Company announced Monday that a 404.2-carat white diamond, about the length of a credit card, had been discovered. The find came at a 1,148 square-mile site that has since 2015 given up more than five dozen "large special diamonds," reports CNNMoney. It's the largest to come out of Angola by far, besting the stats of a 217.4-carat diamond found in 2007, per a release from the company. And size isn't the diamond's only impressive attribute: It's also colorless—D-colored being the rarest and probably most valuable grade, per CNNMoney—and, as a Type IIa gem, is nearly flawless.

"When we first looked at the property ... untouched ground, [435 miles] inland from the coast, you are talking about a very, very remote area," Lucapa's chairman tells Australia's ABC News. "The results today are a wonderful vindication of eight years of pretty hard work." He adds the "spectacular" rock—believed to be the 27th largest diamond ever recorded and the largest ever recovered by an Australian diamond miner—is likely worth more than $20 million. (Miners recently found the second-largest diamond ever.)

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