Three years later, still searching for answers, the Maryborough man brought it into the Melbourne Museum.ĭermot and the museum’s emeritus curator in geosciences, Bill Birch, were used to pouring cold water on the discovery of what they’ve dubbed ‘meteor-wrongs. The result of David’s investigations were a few drill marks and a suspicion or two, but nothing concrete. So, as any good handyman would, he took it into his shed to figure it out. He just had no idea what on Earth it was. The local prospector was sweeping for gold with a metal detector when he hit upon the 17-kilogram hunk of rock.ĭavid knew he’d struck something unusual. Of those, the Maryborough is the most recent. These were found, often many years after crash landing. The Murchison is the only known meteorite to be witnessed and collected in Victoria.īut there have been 16 other meteorites recorded in the state. The Maryborough Meteorite-replete with drill and axle grinder marks. Below are 10 others-as well as one which disappeared. The Murchison is just one of many strange and storied space rocks held by Museums Victoria. ‘With meteorites, the samples come to us.’ ‘Studying meteorites is the least expensive form of space exploration,’ Dermot says. Its ‘exceptionally rare’ chemical composition-which gives the meteorite its distinctive smell-may well ‘offer clues to the origins of life’.Īnd all this from fragments of a rock which was picked up in cow paddocks. But Dermot-a man who has devoted his life to rocks-ranks the Murchison Meteorite as his favourite in the collection.īecause this is a rock which may well harbour secrets of the formation of the Solar System, Dermot says. The museum holds both lunar and martian rocks. as exciting as Moon dust’.īut over the subsequent decades, its scientific prestige has only mounted from that first impression.įifty years later, Museums Victoria Dermot Henry says that innocuous-looking, remarkable-smelling black rock is now, probably, the world’s most studied meteorite. On the spot, John declared it as ‘almost. To the geologist, it was the unmistakable odour of organic molecules, including amino acids-the building blocks of our DNA. When John opened the bag he was hit with a pungent smell similar to methylated spirits.
Within was a chunk of a meteorite that had just exploded above the northern Victorian town of Murchison. In September of that year Professor John Lovering was disembarking a plane with Moon rock samples when a journalist presented him a plastic bag. On 24 July 1969 the Apollo 11 astronauts returned to Earth with rocks from the surface of the Moon.īut what if they were not the most important rocks collected in the 20th century? What if they weren’t even the most scientifically significant rocks found in 1969? A fragment of the Murchison, perhaps the world's most studied meteorite.