[yeukhon]

See my edit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7299294

It has been found a long time ago on Jack Hills. But you are right, somehow, someone, a long time ago, walked on Jack Hills and found a crystal pretty old and started calling for interest.

[it_learnses]

It seems like it's a pretty small crystal (largest dimension is about the width of 4 human hairs - if I understand correctly). I'm curious as to how they actually found it...

[jofer]

Basically, they took chunks of what they already knew was a very old (~3.6 billion years old) rock, ground them up, separated out the zircon grains, and dated many (100's to 1000's) of individual zircon grains.

[Groxx]

It would probably have been found by someone looking for the ages of rocks. In which case: probably sifted out of buckets of earth, looking for signs of extreme age. Seems like it's from a known-interesting area, which would attract that kind of crowd.