Photo courtesy Arkansas State Parks
Just two months after the discovery of a 9.07-carat diamond, Arkansas’ Crater of Diamonds State Park has produced another remarkable find.
On Halloween, park visitor and self-proclaimed ‘newbie’ hunter, Steven McCool, recovered a 4.49-carat canary-yellow diamond while wet sifting in the site’s Canary Hill area.
“As my eyes were panning to it, I was thinking it could be an amber piece of glass, like an old Coke bottle,” he says. “Once I focused on it, though, I knew it was a diamond. I was like, ‘No way!’”
McCool’s diamond—which he has dubbed ‘BamMam Diamond’ in honour of his children—is the park’s third-largest found this year, officials say.
“Mr. McCool’s find is a 4.49-carat sparkling, canary-yellow diamond that is about the size of a jellybean and seems to have great clarity,” says Meghan Moore, the assistant superintendent of Crater of Diamonds State Park. “It is a stunning diamond.”
She added that finding a diamond of that size while wet sifting is unusual.
“It is extraordinarily rare to catch a diamond in the top screen of a screen set,” Moore says. “The mesh size of the top screen is larger and typically used to catch and remove bigger pieces of gravel; not diamonds.
“The average diamond size found wet sifting a quarter of a carat. Typically, larger diamonds are found by surface searching.”
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