Martian rock that crash landed in the Sahara listed to sell for around $2M at auction
Largest piece of Martian rock on Earth goes up for auction
- Sotheby's in New York is auctioning an "incredibly rare" 55-pound Martian rock, named NWA 16788, with an estimated sale price of over US$1.6 million (£1.2 million).
- Discovered in Niger in 2023, the reddish-brown meteorite travelled 140 million miles to Earth and is the largest piece of Mars ever found on our planet.
- The rock, an olivine-microgabbroic shergottite, represents nearly seven per cent of all Martian material currently on Earth and was previously exhibited at the Italian Space Agency.
- Also going on sale at Sotheby's is an 11-foot-long juvenile Ceratosaurus nasicornis skeleton, expected to fetch between $ 4million and $6 million.
- The dinosaur skeleton, found in Wyoming in 1996, dates back approximately 65 million years to the late Cretaceous period and will be auctioned on Wednesday.