Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Meteorite chunks are selling for more than gold nuggets, with predictable results, says a recent Mosnews article (love their picture!): Customs officers in Dorohusk, on Poland’s border with Ukraine, have made an unusual seizure, confiscating nearly 530kg of meteorites they found hidden in a Russian-registered truck…According to the truck’s payload ledgers, its cargo was quartzite, a tough stone composed almost entirely of quartz grains, derived from sandstone.

These fragments aren’t just any old meteorite, says the Vladivostok News:

The pieces weighing a total of 529 kilograms are part of a Sikhote-Alin meteorite collection, the experts from Warsaw’s Geological Museum said. According to them, the three biggest pieces with a weight of 178, 150 and 130 kilograms, each are engraved with numbers and could belong to some museum collection.

The ferric Sikhote-Alin meteorite, ranked among the world’s ten biggest meteorites, fell in Primorye’s Ussurisky taiga in February of 1947. The weight of the fragments found on the spot amount to a total of 30 tons, the biggest one weighing 1,745 kilograms. The world’s greatest museums boast exposing this meteorite’s fragments in their collections.

No word on which boasted collection was the source of this truck’s all-too-hot meteor fragments.