Largest piece of Mars on Earth fetches $5.3 million at auction
A fragment of Mars, the largest ever found on Earth, was sold for a staggering $5 million at a rare geological and archaeological auction in New York on Wednesday.
However, the highlight of the auction was a rare young dinosaur skeleton, which outshone the meteorite by fetching over $30 million in an intense bidding battle, News.Az reports, citing AP.
The 54-pound (25-kilogram) rock named NWA 16788 was discovered in the Sahara Desert in Niger by a meteorite hunter in November 2023, after having been blown off the surface of Mars by a massive asteroid strike and traveling 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) to Earth, according to Sotheby’s. The estimated sale price before the auction was $2 million to $4 million.
The identity of the buyer was not immediately disclosed. The final bid was $4.3 million. Adding various fees and costs, the official sale price was about $5.3 million, making it the most valuable meteorite ever sold at auction, Sotheby’s said.
The live bidding was slow, with the auctioneer trying to coax more offers and decreasing the minimum bid increases.
The dinosaur skeleton, on the other hand, sparked a war among six bidders over six minutes. With a pre-auction estimate of $4 million to $6 million, it is one of only four known Ceratosaurus nasicornis skeletons and the only juvenile skeleton of the species, which resembles the Tyrannosaurus rex but is smaller.
Bidding for the skeleton started with a high advance offer of $6 million, then escalated during the live round with bids $500,000 higher than the last and later $1 million higher than the last before ending at $26 million.
People applauded after the auctioneer gaveled the bidding closed.
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