Treasure Is Bigger in Fiction

"That is nearly ten tons in gold. It does not have to look big."

— Mr. Bent, Making Money

Next time you get a chance, pop into your local jewelry store and take a look at the gems. Notice anything about them? They're all tiny, on the order of the size of a pinhead. If you pried every stone in the place loose from its setting and piled them up, the entire heap would probably fit in a soup pot. (And then, assuming you broke in to do this, you would be arrested, but that's beside the point.)

In Real Life, gem-quality stones larger than a person's fingernail are so rare that they are almost never for sale on the open market. This doesn't apply in fiction, where a single gem can easily be the size of your fist... head... torso... you get the idea. It's also not very uncommon if gems that are mined are already cut.

When it comes to gold, the problem is not size (unless you're talking City of Gold or Pooled Funds quantities) but weight. Most of us only ever see gold in tiny quantities (and usually alloyed with lighter metals) so it's hard to notice that it's more than twice the density of lead. A standard gold bar weighs about thirty pounds, so if the guys pulling off The Caper are carrying more than one or two at a time, they're not going to be hard to catch. For reference, $1 million (US) worth of gold is just two Good Delivery (i.e. "standard") gold bars and weighs a bit more than 53lbs. (€1 million worth of gold is about 2.5 bars and masses about 30 kilograms) ^note  This is using June 2018 prices.

In Video Games, it gets even more ridiculous. Not only are gemstones enormous, but the same thing largely applies to money or even pieces of jewelry, especially in platform games. In video games, this is also often done for convenience because finding coins, jewelry or rings as small as a thumbnail can be rather hard since that would often mean that they would take up a space of a size less than a pixel. (Compare Units Not to Scale.) Of course, characters themselves have enough hammerspace to fit a lot of them in their pockets.

Additionally there is often some Artistic License – Geology (or possibly Everything's Better with Sparkles) in cartoons referencing valuable minerals, particularly diamonds. In fiction you'll often see a mineral faceted, polished, and/or sparkling straight out of the ground. In Real Life, clean and perfectly formed crystals are rare in nature, and most rough gems (at least to the inexpert eye) just look like dirty pebbles. We call this All-Natural Gem Polish, a closely related trope.

Compare Cheap Gold Coins. Contrast with Enormous Engagement Ring where the extreme size of the gemstone is acknowledged in-universe. Giant Novelty Check could be considered a Defictionalization of this trope. See also Hollywood Density, for when treasure, especially gold, weighs suspiciously little.

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Examples of works with huge gemstones:

Anime and Manga

• Magic Kaito (not to mention all the spinoff specials/movies its star has appeared in) zigzags this for the most part: in its early Denser and Wackier chapters Kaito could steal jewels of any size (along with plenty of other things), but after the Pandora Myth Arc was established he sticks almost entirely to Big Jewels (which the series treats as its own special category, complete with Gratuitous English pronunciation). These tend to be at least the size of a man's fist, and are often introduced as the world's biggest emerald/amethyst/beryl/whatever. Justified in that a lot of them are specifically found - and possibly cut/polished - by Eccentric Millionaire Jirokichi Suzuki specifically to serve as bait for Kid heists.

Comic Books

• In The Maniaks, Silver Shannon was given an engagement ring containing a diamond bigger than her head.

Film — Animated

• In the Wallace & Gromit short The Wrong Trousers, Feathers McGraw has Wallace steal a fist-sized diamond in his sleep.
• Disney:
  • In The Rescuers, Madame Medusa uses Penny to get the Devil's Eye, the size of a grapefruit and supposedly the biggest diamond in existence.
  • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs introduced the Dwarfs by showing their mining operation, in which they dug out pre-cut gems averaging the size of Dopey's eyes.
  • In Aladdin, a monkey idol in the Cave of Wonders holds a giant ruby that Abu really shouldn't have picked up. It's almost as big as he is.

Film — Live-Action

• The Dark Knight: Alfred mentions "a ruby the size of a tangerine" as one of the precious stones the bandit he fought in That South East Asian Country had stolen and thrown away. We never actually see it though, so it's entirely possible he was exaggerating.
• Death on the Nile (2022): The diamond necklace Simon got for Lynette is massive, with the primary stone being about the size of a golf ball.
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: Although the sankhara stones aren't conventional looking diamonds, Indy is on the search for three historical stones, all about 10 inches long.
• Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, the MacGuffin is the 'Eye of God': an emerald approximately the size of a loaf of bread.
• Moon Zero Two: The McGuffin turns out to be a sci-fi twist on this trope: An asteroid composed entirely of sapphire, which the Big Bad plans to crash into the Moon to make it easier to harvest. The protagonist's Love Interest immediately points out that trying to do anything with it would leave sapphires "worth as little as coloured glass", which would defeat the whole point of the multiple crimes he's committed to get his hands on it, but it turns out the villain's motive is a bit more complicated than simple Gold Fever: Sapphire makes a very good thermal insulator, and dropping its price would reduce the manufacturing costs for spacecraft engines enough to make further interplanetary colonisation feasible... and the villain intends for every single one of those new colonies to belong to him.
• The Mummy Returns: Has a pyramid topped with an approximately man-sized diamond. At the end, Jonathan grabs it while suspended from a dirigible, though its weight should realistically be enough to dislocate his shoulders were he to try such a thing.
• Ширли-мырли: This Russian comedy (Shirly-Myrly; meaningless gibberish often said by one of the characters) is centered around a diamond so big, that once sold, it can solve all the economical problems of Russia and allow a three year vacation for its entire population.
• Snatch.: The diamond has a diameter of about 4-5 centimetres (1.6 inches) and weighs 86 carats. Notably, everyone in the film who knows anything about jewelry makes a huge deal about its size.
• Stardust: While attempting to woo Rich Bitch Victoria, Tristan says he will go to Africa and return with a diamond as big as her fist (among other boyish attempts to gain her affection).
• Titanic: Rose wears the 'Heart of the Ocean', a large blue gemstone.

Literature

• Invoked in-universe in Moving Pictures, in which the faux-tunnel used to film the mining scene in Blown Away had cut-glass gemstones the size of chickens set into its walls.
  • Also in the Discworld, in Reaper Man, where Death gives an 800 carat diamond called the Tear of Offler (a crocodile god) as a gift to Renata Flitworth.
  • In The Last Continent, Strewth the opal miner discovers an oblong opal several feet wide and about half as tall. It's specifically mentioned that if he'd found an opal the size of a bean, that would have been enough to knock off for the day, and finding an opal the size of a thumb would have been cause for celebration. Unfortunately for Strewth and his mates, the fact this opal's dimensions are identical to those of the Luggage turns out not to be a coincidence.
  • Subverted in Making Money, where Mr. Bent's explanation of the gold being smaller than people think is to hide the fact that it's been embezzled for years by the Lavishes with his unwilling participation.
• In The Worm Ouroboros by E R Eddison we have this in the description of the king's palace:
  But the great wonder of this chamber, and a marvel to behold, was how the capital of every one of the four-and-twenty pillars was hewn from a single precious stone [...] all hewn from faultless gems, thrice the bulk of a big man's body
• The Elric Saga features the throne of Melnibone, which is said to have been carved from a single ruby.
• Similarly, the throne of the Padishah Emperor of Dune is described as carved from a single piece of either Hagar quartz or Hagar emerald.
• The Stormlight Archive has multiple gems bigger than a man's head. Justified since the setting's ecology includes dragon-sized crustaceans that grow huge gemstones within their chrysalises. Their abundance is extremely important because gems are essential for the Functional Magic of Soulcasting, which provides a vital food source among many other benefits.
• In Dragon Queen, the Dragon Queen in the old man's story tried to steal a large statue made of gold.
• "The Diamond As Big As the Ritz" from a short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald; it is supposed to be one of the mountain-sized variety.
• Artemis Fowl has Artemis extort one ton of gold from the fairies. However, its weight is irrelevant as it's brought in on a hover trolley.
• In the Wars of Light and Shadow, the Koriani witches cast magic through gemstones. Some of their greater focuses are enormous, with their most important stone, the Waystone of the Koriathain, being a flawless and perfectly spherical amethyst the size of a melon. Their second greatest stone, the Skyron Aquamarine, isn't much smaller.
• Subverted in one Gotrek & Felix story, where one dwarf recounts an expedition to The Maiden's Eye, a diamond that could be seen glinting at the top of a mountain peak, said to be a big as an oxcart. They found it all right, as big as the stories said... it's just that it was made entirely of salt.

Live-Action TV

• In an episode of The A-Team where the team is called to help open a South African diamond mine, the team is given a diamond that fills Face's palm as a deposit. In an attempt at realism, Face declares that the gem is flawed and will have to be cut into several smaller stones before it can be marketed.
• In the Stargate SG-1 episode "Ascension", Orlin makes a large emerald for Major Carter, destroying her microwave in the process. When Carter remarks about how large the gem is, Orlin claimed it was difficult to figure out the gem's typical size from a book.
• Averted in Castle Season 6, Episode 8, "A Murder Is Forever", in which the group finds a diamond about as big as a man's palm, and spend a big chunk of the rest of the episode trying to find out how such an absurdly large diamond could exist without the entire world knowing. It turns out to be the prototype of a breakthrough technique that can synthesize flawless diamonds of any size, rendering diamond mines superfluous.
• Done semi-reasonably in an episode of Mission: Impossible where the team is sent to steal the world's largest diamond from a dictator. The diamond weighs about eight pounds uncut and is about the size of a shoe. That's three times the size of the RL world's largest diamond, but the stone is explicitly stated to be one of a kind recent discovery.
• One episode of MacGyver was centered around treasure buried in Alexander the Great's tomb. It turned out to be a sapphire approximately the size and shape of a plate.
• Averted in White Collar season 6, where one of the MacGuffins is a diamond the size of a child's fist, which looks ridiculously puny compared to a standard prop diamond. It's one of the greatest treasures in the world.

Radio

• In The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy 1978, Arthur, Trillian, Ford and Zaphod are detained in Margathea's planetary catalogue. In full artificial reality, they experience the dizzying range of worlds Magrathea can custom-build for the rich and tasteless. One is made of pure gold with beaches of diamond sand studded with huge diamonds. Zaphod tries to stuff his pockets until he is reminded there is no point, it's all artificial reality.

Video Games

• Since Rupees in The Legend of Zelda are specifically used as currency in Hyrule, scroll down to the Huge Currency section for details.
• In Boulder Dash, diamonds are big enough to crush Rockford or enemies if they fall on them.
• The most valuable pickup in Golden Force is a massive gold medal, whose sprite is literally larger than your onscreen players.
• Repton has diamonds as big as Repton himself.
• The Sonic the Hedgehog series has the Chaos Emeralds, seven fist-sized gems of varying colors, and the Master Emerald, a gemstone the size of a full-grown man. In addition to being implausibly large, they also give you super-powers, which real emeralds seldom do.
• Wacky Races NES game.
• Jazz Jackrabbit, the whole first planet, Diamondus, where there are huge gems inside the ground that are already cut.
• Runescape. Despite this, gems can be cut within a second.
• Spelunky features gemstones that are the size of your character's torso.
• Even in Mega Man games. Example - Jewel Man's stage.
• Bubble Bobble series: Rainbow Islands, Bubble Symphony, and Bubble Memories.
• NES version of A Boy and His Blob has blue gemstones larger than the Boy himself.
• The gems in Crash Bandicoot series.
• Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy has a gemstone the size of a good-sized house. The miners digging it out are not actually sure how they're going to transport it even once they have, but figure they have a good decade or so of digging to contemplate the problem, so why bother?
• Wario:
  • Since Wario is obsessed with money, nearly every game in the Wario Land and WarioWare series has very large pieces of treasure.
  • The Big Bad of Wario World is a giant, evil purple gemstone with magical powers.
  • WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$: In the "Diamond Dig" microgame, Wario drops into a recess in the ground to land behind a diamond as big as his head.
• Minecraft
  • You can make entire tools and armor sets out of a small amount of diamonds — an entire chestpiece only takes eight.
  • Emeralds are big enough to cover the player's entire face.
• Wizards & Warriors games have these all over the place.
• In the Speed Slice challenge of Wii Sports Resort, giant diamonds are one of the possible objects to cut. Don't ask how it's possible.
• The gems floating around in the Spyro the Dragon series are almost as big as Spyro.
• Dangerous Dave, what big gems do your games have. Specifically as tall as Dave and twice his width.
• Hocus Pocus had large gemstones floating mid-air.
• One of the maps in City of Heroes is a cave with enormous gemstones in the walls, easily as big as your character. Presumably these gemstones are so common that they're not worth mining, especially given the danger of being nobbled by supervillains while down there.
• In Crystal Caves the eponymous crystals are the size of your protagonist.
• The Legend of Kyrandia:
  • The Kyragem, a powerful magical artifact. It is roughly as wide as a regular kitchen table and set into the ground. May not count since not only is it a powerful magical artifact, it's the powerful magical artifact that's the source of all the magic in the kingdom.
  • The setting also has gemstones lying around practically everywhere (they tend to spawn randomly) that are finely cut and seemingly the size of large fruits. One tree has apple-sized rubies growing from its branches. One cave is full of towering emerald crystals. They're mainly used for alchemy and decorations.
• The jewels in Montezuma's Revenge are fully half the size of Panama Joe.
• Monster Hunter (PC) have the player occasionally collecting jewels in the labyrinths while battling monsters, including football-sized rubies. For perspective, a sack of gold adds 250 to the player's score, a treasure chest adds 500, while the giant ruby adds 700.
• In World of Warcraft, everything tends to have exaggerated proportions for stylistic reasons, so all gemstones follow this trope, but the most extreme example is Oshu'gun, a mountain-sized diamond that was originally a sort of magical dimension-traveling spaceship.
  • "Old Ironforge" is a cavern beneath the Ironforge throne room, a place that seems to have significance to the dwarves. The walls and ceiling are covered in raw, blue diamonds that vary wildly between the size of a dwarf, and the size of a full-grown dragon.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Morrowind has perfectly polished gemstones which are even larger than the series' gold coins.
  • Skyrim takes some steps to Downplay this as much as what would be practical. All of the gemstones you find in the game are larger than your thumb, but if you drop one, finding it again easily risks becoming a Pixel Hunt. However, gathering a large number (probably around 10-20 or so) into your inventory then dropping the whole lot of them all at once sometimes results in one gigantic gem the size of a dagger.
• Averted in Grand Theft Auto IV. A bag of diamonds becomes a recurring plot point, but even though one scene has a character talk about how high quality they are, the gems themselves are fairly small.
• Averted in Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance where the gems used to enchant items and weapons are so tiny, the player can't even see what they are until picked up (as the camera is in the typical Diablo hack-n-slash angle). This would normally be very annoying, but fortunately gems sparkle when dropped, and you only need to be near an item to be given the pick-up prompt.
• Pearls in Beyond Good & Evil tend to be approximately the size of the main character's head.
• In Day of the Tentacle, Bernard has to acquire a 4,000 carat diamond to repair the Chron-A-John (Which he manages to buy from the shopping channel once he scrapes up the money). The largest uncut diamond on Earth was under 3,200 carats.
• Deep Rock Galactic: Of course, the gems in question are all fictional, but the ones that come as single chunks of raw gemstone come in the form of enormous chunks as tall as the dwarves that mine them and half as thick. And so does the occasional nugget of pure gold, of about the same size. And the gold veins look quite large and pure, letting you carve out several kilograms each (or a literal ton or two if you defeat a Crassus Detonator). Perhaps justified, in that Hoxxes IV is explicitly identified as the richest planet in the galaxy in terms of riches to be found; that's why you're there, after all. You're just the first to try because it's also a Death World of high caliber.
• Parodied in LEGO City Undercover. Vinnie Pappalardo tells Chase McCain that he's heard the Bell Pepper Emerald is as large as a man's head. A royal woman used to wear it as a brooch, but eventually she sold it because wearing it gave her back problems.
• The Henry Stickmin Series features three gemstone MacGuffins just smaller than the characters' bodies.
  • The eponymous Tunisian Diamond from Stealing the Diamond is the item Henry aims to steal from the museum it's at. In the Unseen Burglar route, he exploits the trope by dropping the diamond on the head of an unsuspecting guard.
  • In Infiltrating the Airship, the Pure-Blooded Thief scenario involves Henry finding and stealing the Romanian Ruby from the Toppat Clan.
  • The route of Completing the Mission that combines the aforementioned Pure-Blooded Thief ending with the Ghost Inmate one from Fleeing the Complex has Henry complete the set by taking another gem owned by the Toppats, the Norwegian Emerald. Throwing it like the diamond at the Right-Hand Man doesn't work at all due to both being on the same level.
• Diamonds in Stardew Valley are nearly the size of your head. They sell for enough money to buy two and a half cups of coffee, or five bags of corn seed.

Visual Novels

• Sharin no Kuni, Himawari no Shoujo: The diamond found by Kenichi and Sacchi while spelunking is roughly the size of a fist.

Webcomics

• Erfworld has damn big gems. They're almost bigger than the (admittedly short) people of its world.
• The Easy Breather: In The Frame-Up, the Rwanda Ruby is about the size of Harriet Flynn's head.
• Grist in Homestuck. Basic rule: the bigger is the monster you kill, the bigger are the pieces of grist you get.
• El Goonish Shive: The Dewitchery Diamond is about the size of Elliot's head, and in the journal that details the circumstances of its enchantment it is described as merely "large", suggesting that it was not the biggest diamond the author of the journal had ever seen. Much later, though, it turns out that it's not even a diamond, providing the even more likely explanation that said author just didn't know anything about geology.

Web Original

• The Lay of Paul Twister actually gets this one right, and averts All-Natural Gem Polish as well, for good measure:
  Paul (narrating): Sitting before me was the largest sapphire I had ever seen. It was uncut, a slightly dull blue in appearance, a lumpy, amorphous blue rock, but I'd seen enough gems to know what it was I was looking at. Now, in case you're not familiar with jewels, and think that "a big gemstone" is like something out of a cartoon, large enough to sit on like a stool, allow me to disabuse you of the notion. This rough sapphire was about half the size of a chicken's egg, and that's freaking enormous as gems go!
  • Later on in the story, it also gets gold right: Paul recognizes that a golden statuette of a warrior, about two feet tall, would probably weigh about as much as he does, if not more, and he'd have trouble lifting it without help.

Western Animation

• DuckTales (1987): Constantly, but taken to extremes in the Ali Bubba's Cave trilogy which revolves around a massive diamond mine, all featuring All-Natural Gem Polish of course, with the final episode featuring an enormous diamond easily the size of a minivan.
• The Pink Panther: The picture above is from the short Pink Ice.
  • The original film that began The Pink Panther franchise also features a gem of considerable size and weight.
• Futurama: In the episode "Where the Buggalo Roam", the native Martians' ancestors traded the entire western hemisphere of Mars to Amy Wong's ancestor for what the current Martians believe is a single worthless bead. In the climax of the episode, when Kif is about to be crushed to death by the "bead" for accidentally insulting the Martians, Fry and Leela remark that the "worthless bead" is actually a gigantic diamond the size of a car. The Native Martians then realize that they thought that their ancestors were swindled because they had no concept of ownership, which is not the case with the contemporary Native Martians after Amy suggests they just trade the land back:
  "Land shmand! We don't wanna live on this planet. It's a dump. We'll buy new planet and act like it's sacred. With cash like this, who's going to argue? Nobody, that's who!"
• On an episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes, Heloise, as part of a instructional video on dating, is given a large diamond ring. She tests to see if it is real by using it to cut up a mirror. And the guy who gave it to her.
• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: One episode has Jimmy and friends making use of boulder-sized, polished, and cut diamonds they found sticking out of a mountain face...
• In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, all the gems and jewels are... quite big. And numerous enough that Rarity can make just about anything she wants Gem-Encrusted, which is her design trick of choice. Spike can also eat them by the bowlful without anyone getting mad.
  • "Hearth's Warming Eve" reveals that when Equestria was first settled in, gems the size of ponies were jutting out of cliff faces everywhere.
    • Balancing out the size and commonality of gems is their low value. A (human) fist-sized dazzling cut gemstone is considered a generous tip for a bellhop, treated like giving one IRL a twenty dollar bill.
    • When actual sizes are given in carats, they are always ludicrously low. Fist-sized gems are described as being twenty carats. So either their carats are not like our carats, or the ponies are only a few inches tall (which would make the toys life-sized).
• Richie Rich regularily uses oversized gemstones for mundane purposes, such as doorknobs or bike handles.
  • One cartoon short had some friends who wanted to play baseball ask Richie to supply them with a diamond to play on, and helpfully supplied the dimensions needed. Too bad they didn't specifically tell him they wanted a baseball diamond. No, Richie did not have a gem the size of a baseball diamond.... But he did have two that were half that size, so he brought them both.
• Looney Tunes short "Ali Baba Bunny" had a treasure room chock full of huge gems-Daffy Duck tries to abscond with one as big as he was. Later, he tries to take a pearl of the same scale but he had been shrunk by then, so it was actually a normal-sized one.
• One episode of Timon & Pumbaa has Pumbaa finding a gold nugget the same size of his head.
• An episode of Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers has Fat Cat forcing a gorilla to steal a giant diamond belonging to an aristocrat woman named Mrs. Clutchcoin. The diamond is the size of an oil drum and is attached to a pearl necklace around her neck while being propped on top of a dolly cart.

Real Life

• The Bahia emerald: 840 lbs, 380 kg, 180,000 carats.
• Space has a good number of these, as far as current science can tell.
  • The biggest diamonds in the universe are located in the white dwarf stars with carbon cores. Technically they're enormous single diamonds, but good luck mining them... Also, it's unlikely that they actually look like jewels, despite having diamond composition — most of the diamonds used in diamond-edged blades, among other things, look rather like gray dust to a bare eye.
  • The planet PSR J1719-1438 b, which is probably a diamond the size of Jupiter.
  • Carbon-rich planets in general would likely contain thick layers of underground diamond due to the heating and compression of their carbon crusts. If tectonic pressures subsequently lifted these layers above the surface, such planets could potentially have mountains of diamond. However, as noted these would not necessarily look shiny, and depending on what minerals were also in the rocks, they probably wouldn't be clear diamonds either, instead having various colours depending on the inclusions, just like coloured diamonds on Earth.
• The largest rough gem-quality diamond ever discovered, the Cullinan, was about four inches long and weighed over a pound (3106.75 carats before cutting). After cutting, the largest stone of the Cullinan, the Great Star of Africa, was 530.4 carats. The Koh-i-Noor, literally "Mountain of Light", was once the largest known, but as it was first cut thousands of years ago in India, nobody is sure how big it originally was, and the British Crown had it recut down to only 105.6 carats. Both reside in the UK Crown Jewels today. The largest cut diamond today is the Golden Jubilee, at 545 carats; though it was smaller than the Cullinan in the rough, its shape was better for cutting into a single large stone.
• Diamonds are small fry compared to some other stones. The largest piece of jade resides in Myanmar, uncut in its natural state. It weighs over 30 tons.
• The Cave of the Crystals in Chihuahua, Mexico contains some of the largest crystals ever discovered; they're Selenite, a form of Gypsum, and thanks to them growing in a cavity full of water heated by geothermal activity, they've had millions of years to grow into impressive crystal spires weighing several tons and several metres in length, 'flowers' and 'floaters' (smaller crystal formations around the size of your head), as well as the sword-like lengths of crystal found in the adjacent Cave of the Swords. While a handful of the smaller crystal formations have been gathered for study, the larger crystals are so huge that getting them out of the cave would be impossible. As of 2015, the cave has been allowed to refill with the mineral rich hot water the crystals grow from, meaning that what's in there now will only continue to get larger and larger with the passing of time. Here's an image◊ taken from within the cave when it was still drained. Note the human for scale - these are some seriously big crystals!
• The largest pearl, the Pearl of Lao Tzu, weighs over 14 pounds.
• One of the larger cut gems is the Dom Pedro Aquamarine. The uncut crystal weighed over 100 pounds and was three feet long. The finished piece is 14 inches long and weighs 10,363 carats. It resides in the Smithsonian in Washington DC.
• The American Golden Topaz is possibly the largest faceted stone in the world, at 22,500 carats. It's about the size of a human head, making it nearly as big as many fictional stones.
• The Millennium Sapphire is an opaque sapphire carved into a statue of a caravan. It weighs 61,500 carats in total.
• Synthetic sapphire is grown in lumps hundreds of kilograms apiece. Now, they are normally uncolored (technically, corundum) and mainly used to make windows or smartphone screens, but it's theoretically quite possible to make a million-carat gem.

Examples of works with huge money and jewelry:

Comic Strips

• One Garfield comic had him singing on the fence for a Boy Scout troop from a made-up island. After one of the scouts throws a boot at him, Garfield angrily tells them to at least throw money if they must throw something at him. Next panel has him being knocked over by a large object and commenting that he forgot that the only currency on that island was "forty-pound chariot wheels".
• Not exactly a newspaper comic, but a serial called "Wormy" that was featured in Dragon Magazine used this trope. Seen here, When Jed enters a pub to buy a drink.

Literature

• In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu "is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin 6,800 miles along each side, no-one has ever collected enough to own one Pu."
• One of the stories in Pavel Bazhov's Malachite Casket, a collection of fairy tales based on the Ural miners' folklore, has a guy make a bet with a mountain spirit (in the form of a girl) to receive a treasure if he guesses the right one. The first treasure is a large tray heaped with gold nuggets, that he (being a miner and gold prospector) correctly assumes to weigh almost a ton that no girl could hold so effortlessly. The second is a basket of jewels, also unrealistically sized from the human fist to a football.
• The Belgariad: Discussed when a treasonous minor aristocrat confesses the slow escalation of the crimes his country's enemies could bribe him to commit — the problem, he found, was that even when he'd earned a fortune in gold, it didn't look like much sitting in his treasury. Aggravated by the fact that Angarak gold wants to be hoarded and induces Gold Fever in those who possess it.

Tabletop Games

• The largest unit of the Jade currency of the Realm in Exalted is a slab referred to as a talent, which is 24x48 inches and weighs almost seventy pounds. Even its lesser denominations, the bar and the mina, weigh more than a pound and are several inches long. The impracticalities of their size (and their very high value) means that such units are rarely used in actual transactions or even owned in their whole forms; they're more often just moneys of account.
• Enforced in Dungeons & Dragons, though bordering on Acceptable Breaks from Reality. In the earliest editions, every single coin, whether copper, silver, gold or whatever, weighed 1/10th of a pound, supposedly to allow for Smaug-sized treasure hoards. With more realistically-sized coins, such a hoard would easily break the game if the players were allowed to keep it as treasure. And even in later editions, coins weigh 1/50th of a pound.^note For reference, more historically plausible coins would weigh somewhere around 1/200th of a pound

Video Games

• Bell bags in Animal Crossing series are drawn much larger than would fit in the character's pocket.
• DLC Quest: Floating coins are half the size of character's heads.
• Pennies in The Binding of Isaac are half as large as the Player Character. Penny trinkets go beyond that, being Isaac's height and as thick as one of his eyes.
• Densetsu no Stafy 3 has absolutely massive blue jewels in the Undersea Ruins, which Wario nabs for himself whenever you encounter them. They later turn out to be the key to unlocking a door further on in the ruins.
• Banana coins, bear coins, and the like in Donkey Kong Country series. There are even very large coins in Donkey Kong 64... which you don't pick up; they're for standing on.
• DuckTales: Every treasure (all worth $1 million) at the end of every level is huge, even giant coins.
• La-Mulana has coins as large as Lemeza himself.
• The Legend of Zelda, naturally. Rupees are as large as Link's sprite in the original game, as well as several handheld games. Recent games have most rupees represented as slightly smaller, although the large-denomination rupees still closely match Adult!Link for size.
• Magic Sword: The enemies drop coins the size of protagonist's torso.
• Mighty Bomb Jack: Power coin and turning Jack green turns enemies into coins even larger than him. Interestingly, there are money bags that are smaller than the coins.
• In the NES game called Noah's Ark, there are coins half the size of Noah, found when destroying chests.
• Serious Sam II had coin pickups which give points when picked up and like any decent item in the game, constantly spinning mid-air.
• The Super Mario Bros. series has coins as tall as small Mario. Lots of games also feature special coins, such as those with Yoshi's likeness, which are larger than even large Mario.

Real Life

• Surprisingly, this has been Truth in Television at least once. The rai of Yap Island were stone wheels with holes; the largest one discovered measured 4 meters in diameter. These are still used today for ceremonial purposes. Sometimes the inhabitants agree that a stone has changed hands, and leave it where it lies. One of them is legal tender despite lying at the bottom of the ocean. Much like our cash can be exchanged despite lying in a distant vault.
• The Swedish riksdaler, from 1642 until the invention of paper money, came in silver and copper versions of (nominally) equal value. The copper version could weigh up to 44 lb.
• Several exceptionally large gold coins have been made by mints around the world, typically for the purpose of publicity stunts or creating museum exhibits.
  • Canada has the Big Maple Leaf, a gold coin that's a scaled up version of their Gold Maple Leaf bullion coin with a face value of 1 million Canadian dollars, and a diameter similar to a pizza. This coin weighs just under 100 kilograms. Six of them were made, but one was stolen from Berlin's Bode Museum in 2017, and is presumed to have been melted down by the thieves. This was the largest gold coin ever produced, until...
  • Australia did one better, and made a gigantic version of their Gold Kangaroo bullion coin, with a diameter of 80 centimetres, a thickness of around 12 centimetres, and a weight of 1 tonne!

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This planet's a dump anyway. We'll buy a NEW planet and CALL it holy. With cash like this, who's gonna argue? No one, that's who.