By Ula Ilnytzky
A New York City auction will offer 125 meteorites for sale, including a large chunk of the moon and a 179-pound iron cosmic rock that evokes Edvard Munch's iconic painting "The Scream."
The sale, one of the largest of its kind, is being held by the Dallas-based Heritage Auctions on Oct. 14.
The sale also includes a large piece of the Peekskill meteorite,
famous for puncturing a Chevy Malibu in 1992 about 50 miles north of
Manhattan, and the largest complete slice of the most famous meteorite
in the world, the Willamette, a huge specimen that is housed at the
American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The
moon rock has the highest pre-sale estimate of $340,000 to $380,000;
less than 0.1 percent of all meteorites recovered are lunar in origin.
The 18-inch-tall meteorite, dubbed "The Scream," is estimated at $175,000 to $225,000.
"When I first saw this meteorite, I saw the resemblance in a heartbeat," said Darryl Pitt,
who has consigned the piece to the auction. "It is sculpted in part by
atmospheric entry and most significantly by its exposure to the elements
on earth over millennia."
Three
of the concave hallows are evocative of Munch's image of a man holding
his head and screaming under a streaked sky. It is classified a Gibeon
and was discovered in the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa.
More
than half of the meteorites in the sale come from the Macovich
collection, the world's largest grouping of aesthetic iron meteorites —
specimens that are considered desirable for display.
Specimens from the collection are found at the natural history museums in London, >New York
and Paris and The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., among others. Its
principal owner is Pitt, who said that 20 years ago all meteorites were
selling for the same price irrespective of their aesthetic attributes.
"That
has radically changed with the introduction of the first natural
history auction in the mid-1990s," he said in an interview. "I was on a
mission to popularize meteorites. I knew that the only way I would be
able to attract interest on the part of the public was to offer objects
that were more visually captivating."
"The overwhelming majority of meteorites are not aesthetic," he said.
The
cover lot in the sale is of an iron meteorite with naturally formed
holes that resemble a mask. The catalog says it is "arguably the most
exotically aesthetic" and was discovered by indigenous tribesmen in Namibia
with a metal detector. It is estimated to bring $140,000 to $180,000.
The Peekskill piece has a pre-sale estimate of $47,500 to $55,000.
There
are others that have lower estimates but come with interesting stories,
like a small portion of a meteorite estimated at about $4,000 that fell
from the sky in 1492. It was later chained up in a church so it
couldn't fly back into orbit.
Meteorite
prices today depend on many variables. But there are two main markets:
one of aesthetic iron meteorites and the other is of samples whose value
is predicated on attributes other than aesthetics, like a piece of the
planet Mars.
About two dozen of the meteorites in the sale have museum provenance and have no reserve.
"The point is I wanted to create a sale that had something for everyone," Pitt said.
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