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“We can label it fancy yellow, but beyond that, due to its rough nature and the abrasions received through the processing facility, that’s all we can comment on,” Durgin said in an interview. “It’s very hard to give a ballpark estimate. It all depends on, again, the cutting and the resulting stone it ends up.”

The discovery is the seventh-biggest this century, according to Bloomberg calculations, and would be among the 30 largest stones ever unearthed. The biggest was the 3,106-carat Cullinan, found near Pretoria in South Africa in 1905. It was cut into several polished gems, the two largest of which — the Great Star of Africa and the Lesser Star of Africa — are set in the Crown Jewels of Britain.

There have been a slew of big finds in recent years as better technology helped miners first detect, and then not break big stones that are susceptible to being smashed in the mining process. Among those are diamonds found by Lucara Diamond Corp. and Gem Diamonds Ltd. that fetched between $40 and $63 million.

While the Diavik mine is 60 per cent owned and operated by Rio, Dominion bought the stone in an internal auction process from its partner. Dominion said it will select someone soon to cut and polish the stone.

“It’s a beautiful gem-quality diamond,” Durgin said, adding that it was somewhat of a “miracle” that the stone survived the mining process. “It’s very unusual for a diamond of this size in this part of the world. So it’s a very unique discovery.”