The space rock served as a 10-kilogram doorpost on a local farm and lay on Earth for decades before the scientific community realized its value.
“I could tell right away that it was something special,” Mona Serpescu, a geologist at Central Michigan University (CMU), explained in 2018 after examining the body. It is the most valuable specimen I have ever placed in my hands, both financially and scientifically.”
David Mazurek, who lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, asked Serpescu if he would examine a rock he’d had for 30 years to see if it was a meteorite. For Serpeso, this was not an unusual request, but the investigations in general have not yielded dramatic results.
However, this time the result was different. Not only was it a truly space rock, but it was also special.
The object, which has been dubbed the Edmure meteorite, is a large iron-nickel meteorite containing significant amounts of about 12 percent nickel.
How the meteor came into Mazurek’s possession is a separate story in itself. According to Serpescu, when Mazurek bought a farm in Edmore, Michigan, in 1988, the previous owner showed him around the property and saw a large, odd-looking stone used to prop up a shed door.
When Mazurek asks the departing owner about the rock, he tells her that the door jamb was actually a meteorite. The man said that too In the 1930s, he and his father saw the meteor fall on their property at night, “and it made a great noise when it hit”.
The next morning, the duo found the crater left by the object and excavated the meteorite from the newly formed trench. He said it was still warm. The craziest part? The man told Mazurek that since the meteorite was part of the property, it now belonged to him.
So Mazurek kept the space rock for 30 years, continuing to use it as a door jamb, except for the times when his children took the rock to school to display and tell its story.
Eventually, he noticed that people were making money by finding and selling small pieces of meteorites, so he thought he should take stock of the giant rock.
In such cases, what usually happens is that the meteorites are sold and displayed in a museum, or sold to collectors and sellers who want to make a profit. Serbisco said.
Eventually, Mazurek sold the meteorite to the Michigan State University Abrams Planetarium for $75,000 and donated 10 percent of the proceeds to Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, where Serpescu had identified the rock.
