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Copyright (c) Paul Swartz. All rights reserved.
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8.9 kg. UNGR
TKW 21 kg. Fall not observed. Found 1887, San Antonio, Texas, USA.
Paul writes:
I visited the Vienna Natural History Museum (NHM) in May of 2014. The NHM has the largest meteorite display in the world. I felt like a kid in a candy store when I entered the Hall of Meteorites :)
The Meteorite Hall has been completely revamped and provides a stunning experience. In conjunction with the re-opening of the Hall, the NHM published a book about its meteorite collection (photo 2). Naturally, it has lots of first-rate photos. Check it out here.
Dr. Ludovic Ferriere, the Curator of the Rock Collection and co-curator of the Meteorite Collection, was kind enough to give me a behind-the-scenes tour on a day when the museum was closed. He told me there are about 1,100 specimens of 650 different meteorites on exhibit, which represents 12% of the collection.
The museum is forbidden by law to sell any part of the collection and they have ceased trading, so they are dependent on donations of material and money to expand the collection. For more information:
It is the policy of the NHM to allow visitors to photograph the exhibits, but only for personal use. Pictures cannot be used for commercial purposes without written permission. The MPOD is in the personal use category so I am able to post some of the pictures I took.
Visit the NHM web site |
Click to view larger photos
#1
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Found at the arrow (green or red) on the map below
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MexicoDoug
1/3/2017 10:07:40 AM |
You are right, given the 1800s find date and age, the MetBul website will default to the BM location (San Antonio city centre, Bexar Co.) exactly like you, since the MB never published it and it was whisked away to Europe by Vienna. San Antonio seems just a reference city. The only clear info on the find location is that it was alleged to be found in Kendall County - all the rest amounts to speculation. This sort of ambiguity was common for Mexican meteorites in that region...for example Coahuila is named for an entire state, and San Antonio was definitely a colorful south Texas frontier place in those days for a Viennese traveler to use as the closest population Europeans could relate to. |
Paul Swartz
1/3/2017 8:03:58 AM |
There seems to be some confusion about where the meteorite was found. The coordinates (29° 24' N, 98° 30' W) for the map above came from The Catalogue of Meteorites at the Natural History Museum (London) web site. In The Handbook of Iron Meteorites, Buchwald specifies 29° 50' N, 98° 40' W. Cosmic Debris by John G. Burke has a discussion of page 350 and comes to no specific conclusion but does provide insight on why there is confusion. The MetBul web site has been mostly down for weeks and now the Encyclopedia of Meteorites is unreachable, so I was unable to check that. |
MexicoDoug
1/3/2017 2:06:44 AM |
Thanks for the peek into the Vienna Museum Paul! ... interestingly composed Texas Iron! The location in the map here is for the center of San Antonio, in Bexar County. Kendall County, the alleged county where of the find, is located on the north side of Bexar County, centered north of Boerne TX. |
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