The Absent End Piece of 15.5-Ton Willamette Meteorite at NY’s American Museum of Natural History Highlights First Ever Meteorite Auction

On Sunday, Oct. 28 in New York, the conspicuously missing end piece of the Willamette Meteorite—the most famous meteorite in the world and a showpiece of the American Museum of Natural History in New York—will be offered by Bonhams in the first-ever sale devoted exclusively to meteorites. The highly sculptural 30-pound section has an estimated value of $1,100,000 to $1,300,000. Only slivers of this meteorite have previously sold at auction—garnering, ounce for ounce, more than five times the price of gold.

The Willamette has weathered colorful controversy ever since it was discovered in Oregon’s Willamette Valley in 1902. Visited by millions, the Willamette has been on display at the American Museum of Natural History for 99 years, first at the Hayden Planetarium and now as the centerpiece of the Rose Center. The end piece offered here was removed nearly a decade ago as part of a meteorite exchange, in which the Museum acquired an exotic piece of Mars from another major meteorite collection.

The Historic Meteorites & Associated Americana sale will also feature the largest oriented meteorite with naturally-occurring gemstones known to exist. Recovered from a Kansas wheat field in 2005, experts have called the 1,400-pound Brenham meteorite the single most important American meteorite discovery of the last 50 years. It is estimated to sell for $630,000 and $680,000.

Select meteorites de-accessioned from collections at the Field Museum (Chicago), The Smithsonian (Washington D.C.) and the Macovich Collection (New York City) will also be among the 45 lots represented in this multi-million dollar offering.
Said Ed Beardsley of Bonhams, “It is a great privilege to host the first auction ever devoted to meteorites, and we could not be more thrilled given the spectacular offerings included in this sale.”
Darryl Pitt, the curator of the Macovich Collection, the world’s largest collection of aesthetic iron meteorites, added, “This could well be the first and last of such sales—you just can’t top this.”

Other items on the auction block at Bonhams will include specimens of the Moon and Mars; an exotic meteorite whose image is the frontispiece of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Meteorites (estimated at $16,500–$18,500); a large meteorite in the shape of a baseball field’s home plate and with a Natural History Museum (London) provenance (estimate $80,000–$100,000); the fabled Claxton Mailbox—the only known mailbox impacted by an extraterrestrial “special delivery” (estimate $60,000–$75,000); and a chunk of the only meteorite documented to have killed an animal (estimate $3,000–$4,000). This unfortunate interplanetary incident claimed the life of a Venezuelan cow.

Posted: 10|6|07 at 9:03 am. Filed under: Press Release.