Description
Circa 1955, a woman out walking near her rural village in Sonora, Mexico (the find site for Arispe) noticed
an unusual iron-like rock weighing nearly 61 pounds. She gave the rock to her grandson who eventually
moved to San Antonio, Texas, keeping the rock with him as a curiosity. Many years later, the grandson’s
friend, Tim Eidson, noticed the rock and purchased it from the grandson, thinking it might possibly be a
meteorite. He was correct. As an exact find location had not been noted, the new iron was originally
named Nova 057 and—after donating a small piece that Tim and his friend Pete Rios had removed—the
specimen was initially and incorrectly classified as a common IIAB iron. Subsequently, the Eidson Iron
was studied by three prominent meteorite academics, including the late Dr. John Wasson at UCLA, and
was reclassified as an extremely rare IC iron. There are only eleven known IC irons in all of meteorite
science. Arispe is one of those eleven and, after further work was carried out, a determination was
made by meteoriticists the Eidson Iron is “indistinguishable from Arispe.”
We have no reservation in offering these beautiful etched slices as Arispe. The extremely rare type,
expert inspection of the meteorite, measurement of the bandwidth, plus the find site all point to these
slices being newly-available examples of the extremely-difficult-to-acquire historic Arispe. We await an
update to the Meteoritical Bulletin reflecting this new classification.
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