10. The $34.99 Bust From the Goodwill Floor
In 2018, an antiques dealer named Laura Young was at a Goodwill outside Austin, Texas. Under a display table, on the floor, she saw a heavy marble head. It was 52 pounds. The price was $34.99.
She suspected it was old, and auction specialists agreed: it was a 2,000-year-old Roman portrait. A roughly century-old catalog from a German museum showed the same piece.
The bust had once sat in a full-scale replica of a Pompeii house in Aschaffenburg, Germany, before disappearing during World War II. The best guess is that a soldier carried it home, and it ended up in the thrift store decades later.
Instead of cashing in, the bust went back. The Munich Glyptothek lent it to the San Antonio Museum of Art, and it returned to Germany. Even the identity is debated: reports have named Drusus the Elder and, later, Sextus Pompey.