It’s almost a scene out a Looney Tunes cartoon.
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Paul Mooney hands you the small, volcanic-looking rock he and son Eddie found while digging for witchetty grubs and it immediately drags you to the floor.
This rock isn’t your everyday rock. It’s heavy – about seven kilograms – despite being not much bigger than a tissue box, it’s made of metal – which you can see thanks to work with an angle grinder, and – most intriguingly – it’s not from earth.
At least that’s the going theory from the Mooney’s, who found the meteorite two weeks ago along the Ploughman’s creek.
The pair aren’t disclosing exactly where it was found, but they said it wasn’t near an industrial area or former railway lines, where lumps of slag iron can often be mistaken for meteorites.
“My boy and I were scratching around under the gum trees looking for witchy grubs and were digging and went ‘ting’, and there it was,” Mr Mooney said.
He said he had “an inkling” it wasn’t of this world.
“I just knew it was too heavy to be anything else,” he said.
“I’ve picked up rocks all my life and I thought ‘this could be a meteorite’ but people kept asking if there an old smelter or railway line around to see if it was slag iron.
“I took it to Metaland and he said ‘geez, that’s too heavy for steel’.”
Max Rangott, who’s a geologist at Rangott Mineral Exploration and has worked in the field in Orange for over four decades, said he put the chances of it being a meteorite at about 50 per cent, but added he didn’t know what else it could be.
“It looks like it’s been dumped from a height, the shape of it is like a volcanic bomb and it’s definitely not one of those.”
- Max Rangott
Parts of the specimen are off having tests done to test nickel and iron levels, which will provide a “good indication” of the rock’s extra-terrestrial nature, with any evidence of three minerals – taenite, kamacite and schreibersite – making it certain to be a meteorite.
“I can’t tell from looking at it but I’m not not sure what else it could be,” Mr Rangott said.
“It looks like it’s been dumped from a height, the shape of it is like a volcanic bomb and it’s definitely not one of those.”
Mr Mooney is hoping to sell the meteorite if it turns out to be the real deal, with a similar-looking specimen – which weighed 15 kilograms – being sold to Brisbane Museum for $100,000 in 2017.
Neither he nor Mr Rangott know how much it would sell for, but it could be as high as $50,000.
However, the younger Mooney, Eddie, wants the sentimentality, asking if they can keep the stone.
Never really into space study, he said the meteorite has piqued his interest.
“Like I’m thinking of which planet it’s from, how old it is, it could be like three billion years old,” he said.
“It’s really cool.”
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