Press Release

Staff and volunteers prepare meteorites to get added to Field Museum collections

Dinosaur bones aren’t the only things that can become fossils. Four hundred and sixty-seven million years ago-- long before the dinosaurs, and even before trees-- there was a giant collision in outer space. Something crashed into an asteroid, and some of the pieces of rock that broke off fell to Earth as meteorites. They sank into the ocean, where they got buried. Over time, some of the meteorites’ minerals got replaced by different minerals, forming fossils.

In the 1980s, workers in a limestone quarry in Sweden noticed some of these fossil meteorites in slabs of limestone. Since then, more than 100 fossil meteorites have been identified, making them some of the rarest geological specimens in the world.

The Field Museum has received 115 fossil meteorites as a donation from the Boudreaux family. On Monday, July 11th, Terry and Gail Boudreaux helped unpack the meteorites, along with Field Museum scientists, interns, and volunteers. The meteorites are preserved in large limestone slabs from the Swedish quarry, sometimes alongside fossilized sea creatures.

“Fossil meteorites are really important because they can tell us about the evolution of the Solar System,” says Philipp Heck, the museum’s Robert A. Pritzker Curator of Meteoritics and Polar Studies. “Meteorites that fall today can be different from ones that fell hundreds of millions of years ago, because some of the space rocks at the time came from different parent asteroids. Fossil meteorites are remnants of massive collisions and can provide insight into catastrophic events in our Solar System.”

Photos and b-roll are available in the toolkit. If you have any questions, please reach out to press@fieldmuseum.org.