By
Cara Tabachnick
Cara Tabachnick
News Editor
Cara Tabachnick is a news editor at CBSNews.com. Cara began her career on the crime beat at Newsday. She has written for Marie Claire, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. She reports on justice and human rights issues. Contact her at [email protected]
September 25, 2025 / 7:13 PM EDT
/ CBS News
A family visiting Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas found a nearly 3-carat brown diamond on the park’s north side, park officials said in a statement.
Raynae Madison and her family traveled from Oklahoma to Arkansas for her nephew’s birthday and decided to visit the park, buying shovels and screens to hunt for stones. The family set up their tools near Prospector Trailhead, and after digging a few buckets in the park’s 37.5-acre diamond search area, Madison noticed an unusual stone.
“At first I thought it looked really neat, but I wasn’t sure what it was,” Madison said in the statement. “I honestly thought it was too big to be a diamond.”
Madison and her family went to the park’s Diamond Discovery Center, where staff identified the stone as a chocolate brown diamond, with unique inclusions.
“Brown diamonds from the Crater occur due to a process called plastic deformation, which creates structural defects during a diamond’s formation or movement in magma,” Emma O’Neal, park interpreter at Crater of Diamonds State Park, said in the statement. “These defects reflect red and green light, combining to make the diamond appear brown.”
Madison named the stone the William Diamond, in honor of her nephew. The staff said the diamond weighs 2.79 carats and is the third-largest diamond registered at the park this year, surpassing a 2.30-carat diamond found at the end of July.
A 3.81-carat brown diamond – named the Duke Diamond – was found in May.
Tucked away in rural southwest Arkansas, the 800-acre Crater of Diamonds State Park attracts more than 100,000 visitors a year on the hunt for diamonds. People can search for gemstones in the park’s volcanic crater. More than 75,000 diamonds have been unearthed at the park since the first diamonds were discovered in 1906 by farmer John Huddleston, who owned the land. It became an Arkansas state park in 1972.
A New York City woman spent three weeks at the park in August searching for a stone for her future engagement ring. She found the stone she wanted on the last day of her search, a 2.3-carat diamond. A man found a 3.29-carat brown diamond in 2023, the largest diamond found in the park since September 2021, when a 4.38-carat diamond was unearthed.
Cara Tabachnick is a news editor at CBSNews.com. Cara began her career on the crime beat at Newsday. She has written for Marie Claire, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. She reports on justice and human rights issues. Contact her at [email protected]
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