A friend found a rock while hunting, last week. Described it and sent me a photo. Wanted to know if it might be a meteorite. Said a magnet sticks to it.

I saw it today. It's a little more than half the size of a bowling ball and weighs prolly thirty to forty pounds!

I did a little Moh's test and examination of what looked like peridot crystals in a hole. It was a mineral, but not from the meteorite. From what may have encased it, meaning at some time it was on the earth surface, then buried deep down, and resurfaced due to orogeny.

The MAGA man sitting across the table from me piped up, that I was damaging that rock, which was worth a lot of money. I explained what I was doing. I minored in geology, almost with enough hours to be a major. But that doesn't matter because this was no terrestrial rock.

I examined an olivine print on the rock, and determined that most likely came from precambrian gneiss that encased this meteorite a long time ago. Like at least 1.5 billion years, when the gneiss formed. The meteorite is clearly much older. It is most likely NOT a recent fall. It was found on the Evans batholith uplift at an altitude of about 10,000 feet, and is clearly an outlier that would NEVER form under the metamorphic conditions that formed the Evans uplift.

I suggested he take it to the DMNS for an evaluation. The MAGA man, assuming I was both damaging the valuable specimen and bullshitting, said they don't know. Take it to the local Numismatic Museum where it could be evaluated for its worth by experts.

A coin museum to determine value of a meteorite?

First, it has to be determined to be a meteorite. To me it is clearly an iron nickel meteorite. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who has a large meteorite collection, can verify it. In the lab, the museum can determine what content is iron, which nickel, and they may want to document it for their archives. Nobody else has that kind of expertise, or a lab facility to do it.

They will not "steal" it. Steal it and sell it for a lot of money. That was MAGAman's fear.

The MAGA man said not to leave it, or take his eye off it because you can't trust major museum personnel. Full of crooks, you know. The Numismatic Museum is absolutely trustworthy. After all, it's private, and a bunch of coin collectors. Everybody knows coin collectors are absolute authority experts on meteorites.

This is a little glimpse into what kind of people voted for the felon, and what kind still support the felon.