A woman bought a sculpture at Goodwill -It was missing ancient Roman bust.

 If you've ever gone into a Goodwill store you never know what you'll find. I've been in some of them to look for books and even old furniture... but one woman decided to buy a bust of a man who looked somewhat grumpy - and it turned out to be a missing Ancient Roman bust!  Here's the amazing story from MSNBC from May, 2022:

(Image: Laura Young bought a sculpture at a Goodwill store in Austin, Texas, for $35 only to discover it was a missing ancient Roman bust from Germany. Joel Salcido / San Antonio Museum of Art)

A woman bought a sculpture at Goodwill for $34.99. It was actually a missing ancient Roman bust.

May 6, 2022, 9:54 AM EDTBy Chantal Da Silva MSNBC

Laura Young, a Texas antiques dealer, thought she had found a steal when she came across a stunning statue at a Goodwill store in 2018 for just under $35. And while she suspected she had come across something "very special," little did she know the piece would turn out to be a priceless Roman bust dating back to 2,000 years.

When she first came across the bust, scouring for antique treasures in the Goodwill store, one of Young's first thoughts was: "He looked Roman. He looked old." And once she purchased the statue, she told the San Antonio Express-News, "in the sunlight, it looked like something that could be very, very special."

Special, indeed. A Sotheby's consultant eventually determined that the $35 sculpture was in fact a marble Julio-Claudian-era Roman bust.

It had taken years to determine the authenticity of the bust. However, after consulting a range of experts, Young was able to notify the German government of the finding and made arrangements to return it to the Bavarian Administration of State-owned Palaces, the newspaper reported. But first, she said she wanted it to be put on display in her home state and an agreement was eventually made to allow the sculpture to be put on exhibit at the San Antonio Museum of Art.

“He’d been hidden for 70 to 80 years, I thought he deserved to be seen and studied,” Young said. It is believed a U.S. soldier fighting in World War II likely brought the sculpture from Germany to Texas, according to the San Antonio Museum of Art.

How exactly the ancient sculpture dating from as far back as the late first century B.C. or early first century A.D. came to arrive in the Goodwill Store in Austin may never be known.

However, it once stood in the town of Aschaffenburg, Germany, in a full-scale model of a house from Pompeii, called the Pompejanum, built by Ludwig I of Bavaria, according to the San Antonio Museum of Art, where it went up on display on Wednesday.