Brodski and her family entered the park about 9 a.m. Saturday and after less than 10 minutes, she had picked up what she initially believed to be a pretty piece of glass by a culvert near the mine entrance.
Brodski said it wasn't until she was looking at photos of diamonds at the park's Diamond Discovery Center a few hours later that she realized her find may not have been glass.
"I was looking at pictures of diamonds on display and noticed their similarity to what I had found," Brodski said.
Park staff were able to confirm for Brodski that her rock was a brown diamond.
"Mrs. Brodski was searching where running water had deposited lots of gravel in the plowed field. Diamonds are a bit heavy for their size, so they are often found near other heavy rocks and minerals," Park Interpreter Waymon Cox said. "Mrs. Brodski's diamond is one of the more beautiful brown diamonds I've seen from the park. It's about the size of a bead, with a dark brown color, like raw honey. It has a smooth, rounded surface and appears free of blemishes, inside and out."
Brodski dubbed her diamond, the second largest found at the park so far this year, the Michelangelo Diamond, a reference to her family's use of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as code-words.
"When I learned that I had found a diamond, I called my mom and said, 'Michelangelo,'" she said.
