FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS, PEOPLE HAVE BEEN FASCINATED by streaks of light flashing across the night sky. These "shooting stars" are actually tiny grains of dust from space that burn up in Earth's atmosphere before reaching the ground. But hundreds of times a year, a rock called a meteorite survives the fiery trip from space and lands on Earth. A small fraction of these "fallen stars"—really fallen rocks—are recovered each year from around the globe.

The vast majority of meteorites are pieces of asteroids, the small rocky bodies that orbit the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. And while meteorites are not from stars, they contain vital clues that help scientists understand how stars like our Sun formed and how planets, including Earth, took shape more than four billion years ago.

One of the primary goals of studying meteorites is to determine the history and origin of their parent bodies. Several achondrites sampled from Antarctica since 1981 have conclusively been shown to have originated from the moon based on compositional matches of lunar rocks obtained by the Apollo missions of 1969-1972. Sources of other specific metorites remain unproven, although another set of eight achondrites are suspected to have come from Mars. These meteorites contain atmospheric gases trapped in shock melted minerals which match the composition of the Martian atmosphere as measured by the Viking landers in 1976. All other groups are presumed to have originated on asteroids or comets; the majority of meteorites are believed to be fragments of asteroids

Meteorites are bits of former planets, asteroids and planets that has fallen to earth. A seen history either by eyewitness or history is a fall. Others which are found naturally are falls. As of 2010, there are approximately 1,086 actually witnessed falls and about 40,000 finds.

Iron Meteorites

Almost entirely of nickel iron with trace amounts carbon, phosperous and sulphur. Some believe them to be the core of a large asteroid. Iron meteorites show unique textures depending on the amount of Nickel. Although quite common in collections they make up only 5% of falls

Stony Meteorites

Stone meteorites are by far the most common 90+% that fall. Thought to be the ma=terial of the mantle and crustal areas of an asteroid.

Stony Iron Meteorites

Stony Irons are 50% bickel iron and 50% silicate. As a group they are the rarest to fall at about 1.5%

Tektites

Many theories abound about tektites. Some hold that they are glass meteorites, to soil blasted out of the moon in a large impact. Current theory holds they are melted soild blasted into the atmosphere by earthly impact. Many tektites show the pitting and flow lines from high speed flights through the atmosphere

Some meteorites have informal nicknames:; the Canyon Diablo which formed Meteor crater, has dozens of these aliases. Dinostar uses the most used name which is usually in keeping with the Meteorological Society.

Some meteorites, have the same chemical compounds found in Lunar and Martian explorations. Here at Dinostar we keep with the more classic meteorites and some lunars and Martians. Because our collection is very old, we can offer steep discounts.

Some Typical Meteorites we carry:

Canyon Diablo:

The Canyon Diablo iron meteorite, estimated to have weighed 60,000 tons, impacted the Earth approximately 50,000 years ago, resulting in a 20-40 megaton explosion. The impact excavated a crater one mile wide and 600 feet deep. Pressures as high as 60 Gpa transformed graphite particles into tiny diamonds, and vaporized 85% of the original mass. Of the remainder, only about 2,000 tons can be accounted for in the form of meteorite fragments, shale balls, metallic spheroids, and other oxidation products. Meteorite fragments account for only 30 tons of this amount.

Gold Basin:

While prospecting for gold with a metal detector, Prof. J. Kriegh (Emeritus, University of Arizona) found several fragements and individuals. Soon after, a two-year systematic search of the area was begun. Over 2,000 individuals have since been recovered, which define a strewn field of at least 5 miles x 13 miles. These L4 chondrites represent a fossil strewn field, which occurred 20-25 thousand years ago. These specimens have been remarkably well preserved in the arid environment, some still exhibiting remnant fusion crust. Although the meteorites found are primarily L4 type chondrites, some L5 and L6 type specimens have also been found.

Juancheng:

Just before midnight local time, in Juancheng County, Heze Prefecture, a bright fireball was seen to explode and fragment, showering the area with over 1000 individual stones, the largest one weighing 2.6 kg. One stone is said to have fallen through the roof of a farmhouse, landing in a pot on the stove. The fall occurred near the Yellow River in Shandong Province, leaving an east-west oriented, elliptical strewn field measuring 10.5 km x 4.3 kmt Juancheng was a spherical meteoroid with a diameter of 1-3 m, the largest estimate corresponding to 50,000 kg.

Mundrabillia:

Just before midnight local time, in Juancheng County, Heze Prefecture, a bright fireball was seen to explode and fragment, showering the area with over 1000 individual stones, the largest one weighing 2.6 kg. One stone is said to have fallen through the roof of a farmhouse, landing in a pot on the stove. The fall occurred near the Yellow River in Shandong Province, leaving an east-west oriented, elliptical strewn field measuring 10.5 km x 4.3 km. Cosmogenic nuclide data indicate that Juancheng was a spherical meteoroid with a diameter of 1-3 m, the largest estimate corresponding to 50,000 kg.

Murchison:

A fireball exploded over Victoria, Australia at 10:45 on a Sunday morning. This event was accompanied by loud detonations and hissing noises, and was followed by the fall of over 700 stones, permeating the town with the odor of alcohol. The total collected weight of this rare CM2 chondrite was 100 kg, with the largest mass weighing 7 kg. Murchison contains a sparse amount of tiny chondrules that are embedded in a black, carbonaceous matrix. During its early history, the Murchison parent body experienced low degrees of aqueous alteration in which water-bearing phyllosilicates replaced host minerals. Additionally, it contains complex organic compounds, including at least 79 amino acids, along with sugar compounds and fatty acids — the basic ingredients necessary for a rudimentary cell.

NWA Unclassified.:

Dinostar purchased several main mass specimens for sale that were unclassified out of North West Africa. These are designated by the the place found NWA #.

Sikhote-Alin

The Sikhote-Alin meteorite shower fell in a remote forested area of eastern Siberia. Geologists spent two days during the coldest part of the winter searching for the impact site, in an area that is home to Siberian brown bears and Amur tigers. They hacked through miles of dense taiga, a type of evergreen forest found in swampy subpolar regions, before finding the craters.

Expeditions to Sikhote-Alin have gathered more than 29 tons of meteorite fragments, but perhaps twice that amount remains on or under the ground. The twisted shape of the fragment displayed here reveals the intense, wrenching force of the explosion of the original mass. The fingerprint-like impressions in its surface, called regmaglypts, show that friction with the atmosphere started to melt it.

When the Sikhote-Alin fireball appeared in the sky, artist P. I. Medvedev was painting at his easel in the nearby town of Iman. He immediately began to paint the image that was later featured on this Russian stamp, issued in 1957 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the meteorite shower.

The meteorite mass that formed this crater weighed roughly 1,300 kilograms (2,870 pounds) before it broke apart upon impact. The crater, one of the larger ones at Sikhote-Alin, measures 11 meters (37 feet) across. Uprooted trees and shattered pieces of rock lie strewn around the crater rim.

Martian Meteorites?

From the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Of the 24,000 or so meteorites that have been discovered on Earth, only 34 have been identified as originating from the planet Mars. These rare meteorites created a stir throughout the world when NASA announced in August 1996 that evidence of microfossils may be present in one of these Mars meteorites.

Lunar Meteorites (from St. Louis University)

Chemical compositions, isotope ratios, mineral logy, and textures of the lunar meteorites are all similar to those of samples collected on the Moon during the Apollo missions.  Taken together, these various characteristics are different from those of any type of terrestrial rock or other type of meteorite.  For example, all of those meteorites in the List that are classified as feldspathic breccias are rich in the mineral anorthite, which is a plagioclase feldspar, mineralogical, and a calcium aluminum silicate, chemically.  Consequently, these meteorites all have high concentrations of aluminum and calcium.  Because of some unique aspects about how the Moon formed, the lunar highlands are composed predominantly of anorthite.  Anorthite is much less common on asteroids and, to the best of our knowledge, on the surface of any other planet or planetary satellite.

More than 130 named stones have been described in the scientific literature that appear to be lunar meteorites.  Other rocks that have not yet been described in the scientific literature but which might be lunar meteorites are being sold by reputable dealers.  The complication is that some to many of these stones are "paired," that is, two or more of the stones are different fragments of a single meteoroid that made the Moon-Earth trip. When confirmed or strongly suspected cases of pairing are taken into account, the number of actual meteoroids reduces to about 70.  Pairing has not yet been established or rejected for the most recently found meteorites, so the actual number is not known with certainty.  In the List, known or strongly suspected paired stones are listed on a single line separated by slashes.  In most cases, the stones were found close together because a meteoroid broke apart upon encountering the Earth's atmosphere, hitting the ground or ice, or while traveling within the ice in Antarctica. (In the other cases, all from northern Africa, we don't know for sure where they were found.) The six LaPaz Icefield stones all have fusion crusts and the broken edges don't fit together, thus the LAP meteoroid likely broke up in the atmosphere