Man Keeps a Rock For Years Hoping It's Gold. It Turns Out to Be Far More Valuable.
Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay.
He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century.
To break open his find, Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, even dousing the thing in acid. However, not even a sledgehammer could make a crack. That's because what he was trying so hard to open was no gold nugget.
In fact, after 37 years of working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, Henry said only two of the offerings had ever turned out to be real meteorites.
"If you saw a rock on Earth like this, and you picked it up, it shouldn't be that heavy," Melbourne Museum geologist, Bill Birch, explained to The Sydney Morning Herald.
The researchers published a scientific paper describing the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, which they called Maryborough after the town near where it was found.
