A California couple out walking their dog on their property stumbled across a modern-day bonanza: $10 million (£5.9m) in rare, mint-condition gold coins buried in the shadow of an old tree.
Nearly all of the 1,427 coins, dating from 1847 to 1894, are in uncirculated, mint condition, said David Hall, co-founder of Professional Coin Grading Service of Santa Ana, which recently authenticated them.
Although the face value of the gold pieces only adds up to about $27,000 (£16,100), some of them are so rare that coin experts say they could fetch nearly $1 million a piece.
The pair are choosing to remain anonymous, in part to avoid a renewed gold rush to their property by modern-day prospectors armed with metal detectors.
They plan to put most of the coins up for sale through Amazon while holding onto a few keepsakes.
Before they sell them, they are loaning some to the American Numismatic Association for its National Money Show, which opens on Thursday in Atlanta.
What makes their find particularly valuable, is that almost all of the coins are in near-perfect condition.
That means that whoever put them into the ground likely hid them away as soon as they were put into circulation.
Because paper money was illegal in California until the 1870s, Mr Hall added, it's extremely rare to find any coins from before that of such high quality.
The coins, in $5, $10 and $20 denominations, were stored more or less in chronological order, McCarthy said, with the 1840s and 1850s pieces going into one canister until it was filled, then new coins going into the next one and the next one after that.
The dates and the method indicated that whoever put them there was using the ground as their personal bank and that they weren't swooped up all at once in a robbery.
Although most of the coins were minted in San Francisco, one $5 gold piece came from as far away as Georgia.
The coins were found along a path the couple had walked for years.
On the day they found them last spring, the woman had bent over to examine an old rusty can that erosion had caused to pop slightly out of the ground.
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