A doghouse hit by a meteorite in Costa Rica sold for £32,000 at a Christie’s auction.
The tin roof of the wooden house, which originally housed the German shepherd Roky, was pierced by the space object in 2019 in the town of Aguas Zarcas.
Organizers estimated the item could sell for an even higher price, up to £220,000 – more than the proposed starting price for the very space rock that caused the damage.
“To evaluate all items in the auction, we relied on four factors: size, shape, science and history,” explained James Hyslop, head of the Science and Natural History department at Christie’s.
“History and its provenance play a very important role in determining the value,” he told BBC News.
“My first question when I was offered the dog house for auction was, ‘Did Roky survive? I’m happy to say that even though he’s now homeless, he’s doing great.”
The sale was part of an auction for rare and unusual meteorites held every year. And this isn’t the first time an object hit by a meteorite has done well at auction.
A Georgia mailbox was auctioned in 2007 for £61,000.
And an old-model Chevrolet Malibu car hit by a meteorite in Peekskill, New York, in 1992 sold for £170,000 nearly 20 years later.
In this same auction, a 15-gram rock fragment found in the city of Winchcombe, eastern England, was auctioned for 22,300 pounds, or R$150,000.
From a scientific point of view, this piece of space object is considered the most important recovered to date in the UK.
The meteorite fragments landed on several Winchcombe farms on February 28, 2021. After a hunt for its many pieces, families in the community decided to donate the pieces to Science.
More than 90% of what was collected at Winchcombe went on to form part of the UK’s national collection, curated by the Natural History Museum in London, but some fragments ended up in private collections.
The pieces are made up of a substance called carbonaceous chondrite CM2 and contain chemicals found in the formation of the Solar System about 4.6 billion years ago.
The more than 500 grams of the meteorite left in the care of the British national collection will help researchers in their investigations into the origins of the Solar System.
“We have so much to thank the Winchcombe families for making their donations to the national collection. They are true heroes of science,” said Sara Russell of the Museum of Natural History.
Rare – and unusual pieces
Christie’s has held an auction dedicated to meteorites every year since 2014 and attracts many visitors from all over the world.
Some of the items sold come from existing private collections, while others were recently acquired by professional meteorite hunters.
The Winchcombe case drew attention because one of the fragments that fell in the city left a large hole in the sidewalk in front of a house in the city.
The square meter reached was even removed to be exhibited at the Natural History Museum in London.
Probably, if the piece of cement went up for auction, it would also sell at a very high price.
