Man keeps rock thinking it’s gold but three years later is told jaw-dropping truth

A million-to-one find near an old Australian Gold Rush prospecting area turned out to be something far rarer than gold – a glimpse into the earliest origins of our solar system

11:52, 28 Nov 2025Updated 11:55, 28 Nov 2025

Dr Bill Burch [R] , senior curator emeritusand Dermot Henry, [L] head of sciences at Museums Victoria(Image: Source: Museums Victoria / Photographer: Rodney Start)

Out with his metal detector one morning, a man thought he might have come across a giant gold nugget – but the truth was even more astounding.

David Hole made the discovery in the soft yellow clay of Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. It wasn’t a completely outlandish guess. In the second half of the 19th Century, the discovery of gold deposits in the region had sparked a gold rush – helping transform Australia from a remote penal colony to a destination for hopeful immigrants.

But while David had definitely found something interesting that bright May day, the unusually heavy stone was something far rarer and more precious than gold.

The first clues about the mystery rock’s true nature came when David tried to cut it open to confirm whether he had actually struck gold. While gold is a comparatively soft metal, David’s find resisted rock saws, drills, acids, even an almighty whack from a sledgehammer.

Eventually, three years after finding it, David shoved the rock in his backpack and took it to the Melbourne Museum. There, geologists Dermot Henry and Bill Birch told David what he had actually found: a 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite.

Because the rock was so heavy, David assumed it had to contain gold(Image: Source: Museums Victoria / Photographer: Rodney Start)

While they quite frequently get visitors who think they’ve come across a rock from outer space, genuine meteorites are very rare. But as soon as Dermot saw David’s find, he knew it was something special. “It had this sculpted, dimpled look to it,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald. “That’s formed when they come through the atmosphere, they are melting on the outside, and the atmosphere sculpts them.”

Speaking to Channel 10 News, he added that it was a very rare find indeed, saying: “This is only the 17th meteorite found in Victoria, whereas there’s been thousands of gold nuggets found.

“Looking at the chain of events, it’s quite, you might say, astronomical it being discovered at all.”

The interior of the Maryborough meteorite. shows delicate structures called chondrules(Image: Birch et al., PRSV, 2019)

The rock, now christened the Maryborough Meteorite, almost certainly dates from the very earliest origins of the Solar System. Dermot explained: “Meteorites provide the cheapest form of space exploration. They transport us back in time, providing clues to the age, formation, and chemistry of our Solar System – including Earth.

“Some provide a glimpse at the deep interior of our planet. In some meteorites, there is ‘stardust’ even older than our Solar System, which shows us how stars form and evolve to create elements of the periodic table.

“Other rare meteorites contain organic molecules such as amino acids; the building blocks of life.”

Composed of very dense forms of iron and nickel, the Maryborough Meteorite is distinctively heavier than a common-or-garden rock of the same size.

“If you saw a rock on earth like this, and you picked it up, it shouldn’t be that heavy,” Dr Birch said.

The rock could only be penetrated by a super-hard diamond drill(Image: Source: Museums Victoria / Photographer: Rodney Start)

The geologists used a super-hard diamond saw to slice into the meteorite, revealing an inner structure of tiny crystallised droplets of metallic minerals called chondrules. The rock has been classified as an H-type ordinary chondrites – the most common type of meteorite, accounting for some 40% of all those catalogued.

They’re believed to originate from a dense body in the Asteroid `Belt named Hebe, and scattered through the solar system by collisions between celestial objects.. “You’re looking right back to the formation of the solar system here,” Dermot said.

After a long, lonely journey around the Sun, some time in the past 1,000 years or so David’s rock was captured by Earth’s gravity and plummeted into the ground near Maryborough. One possible date for its arrival is in June 1951, when a large fireball was seen streaking across the sky close to where the Maryborough Meteorite was found.

It’s an incredible find, David said: “It was just pot luck, mate. A billion to one – bigger, a trillion to one.Got more chance of being struck by lightning twice.”