Previously, the claim to the largest piece of Mars on Earth had belonged to the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum in Bethel, whose extensive meteorite collection includes the 32-pound meteorite Taoudenni 002. <\/p>\n
And before NWA 16788 was even named, the Maine museum almost got that one, too.<\/p>\n
Darryl Pitt, a meteorite dealer and consultant\u00a0working on behalf of the museum and its co-founder and benefactor Lawrence Stifler, said he bought NWA 16788 in October 2023 for a little less than $500,000. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe next day I was informed by the dealer (with whom I\u2019ve worked with in the past) that the rock would be imminently shipped to me from Mauritania \u2014 and he was on his way to Mauritania to effectuate the same,\u201d Pitt said recently in an email from Perth, Australia, where he was attending the annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society.<\/p>\n
No money had changed yet, and when correspondence with the dealer became \u201cdistressingly foggy,\u201d Pitt said he asked for assurances and was soon pressured to send the money to a dealer he was now unsure even had the meteorite. He was later told about a new partner whose commission upped the price by a third.<\/p>\n
\u201cI then made a rookie mistake,\u201d said Pitt, who has been trading meteorites for decades. \u201cI allowed my anger to cloud my perspective and I balked at paying the extra money now being demanded. I was later informed his partner bought out his interest and that the partner sold the rock to a Chinese buyer. Voila.\u201d <\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/NASAYingst.jpg\")
R. Aileen Yingst, a NASA senior scientist in the Mars Exploration Program, shows Taoudenni 002, then the largest piece of intact Mars meteorite on Earth at the Maine Mineral & Gem Museum in Bethel on Aug. 31, 2021. Credit: Lori Valigra \/ BDN<\/p>\n
Pitt may be the reason NWA 16788 was at a Sotheby\u2019s auction to begin with. A photographer who worked for Rolling Stone and a slew of major touring musicians including Diana Ross, Crosby Stills and Nash, and Neil Diamond, his interest in meteorites started with childhood visit to Meteor Crater in Arizona. <\/p>\n
In the 1980s, the experimental harpist and New Age music pioneer Andreas Vollenweider hired Pitt to be his manager, launching the photographer into a new career in artist management that continues today.<\/p>\n
The money was good, he said, but during one high-pressure project with a famous duo whose relationship had famously fallen apart \u2014 he asked that they not be named \u2014 the stress was so great that Pitt started buying meteorites to get away from the emotional turmoil, eventually traveling the world looking for those rare rocks that had not only come from outer space but were visually appealing, too<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 1995, he entered several of his choice finds into the first natural history auction in New York City, using his photography skills to emphasize the morphological aesthetics of the meteorites, which had until then been traded almost exclusively at rock shows and gatherings of amateur astronomers.<\/p>\n \u201cI was just always struck by beautiful, interesting shapes, and I realized I could buy the ugliest meteorite that existed \u2014 iron meteorite, specifically \u2014 for the exact same amount as the most sublime sculptural object I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d Pitt said. \u201cAnd they all cost the same per unit weight. I thought, this\u00a0is just wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n Collectors agreed, and the high prices fetched at the first auctions motivated a new generation of meteorite hunters, which Pitt said has been a boon to science.<\/p>\n The majority of Martian meteorites have been found in the deserts of North Africa, usually by Berbers, Bedouins and other nomads who had been crisscrossing the desert but now had an incentive to keep their eyes on the ground. These rocks make their way into the hands of collectors and museums through a network of dealers and middlemen, most of whom take pains to stay out of the public eye, Pitt said. <\/p>\n \u201cWhenever you see an article about a North African meteorite hunter or dealer \u2014 they are never the serious players \u2026 not even marginal,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Martian meteorites number fewer than 400 and can be identified by comparing the oxygen isotopes in air bubbles in the rock to the chemistry of air sampled by Mars rovers that have visited the Red Planet.<\/p>\n Pitt acquired Taoudenni 002 for the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum before it opened its doors in the summer of 2021 through a meteorite and desert truffle hunter he described as \u201ca true friend and a remarkably lovely man\u201d who would never speak to a reporter. When the museum opened later that year, it boasted the largest pieces of Mars, the Moon and the asteroid Vesta. <\/p>\n After learning of NWA 16788, the museum changed its displays to indicate Taoudenni 002 is now the second largest piece of Mars on Earth, according to Patrick Leverone, meteorite project director for the museum, though the website still says<\/a>\u00a0it is \u201chome to the largest known pieces of the Moon and Mars.\u201d Likewise, the \u201cMartian meteorite\u201d page on Wikipedia<\/a>\u00a0continues to list Taoudenni 002 as the largest.<\/p>\n The little museum in Bethel still holds the largest collection of Martian meteorites in the world and more pieces of the moon than NASA and all the natural history museums in the world, combined, Pitt said. <\/p>\n Having the largest Martian meteorite helped when the museum opened, but Pitt said it\u2019s not the most important thing. Nor is it a permanent demotion. There are rumors of a still larger Martian meteorite, and he is now awaiting images. <\/p>\n And as he learned early on, size isn\u2019t the only valuable attribute. NWA 16788 may be the largest piece of Mars on Earth, but it\u2019s also a Shergottite, the most common type of Martian meteorite.<\/p>\n The museum is about to acquire a much smaller but unique Martian rock that Pitt said will help \u201crewrite The Book\u201d on Mars. He was limited in what he could say ahead of an\u00a0upcoming story in a major scientific journal.<\/p>\n \u201cIt weighs just a bit more than a pound,\u201d he said, \u201cbut as we all know, good things can come in small packages \u2014 even from Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sometime in the very distant past, an asteroid hit Mars with such force that rocks from the surface…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":97018,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[159,22672,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-97017","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-surprise","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114925898452831436","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/ERINLITTLE_MAINEMINGEM-0992.jpeg\")
The Maine Mineral & Gem Museum in Bethel has the largest collection of lunar meteorites in the world. Credit: Courtesy of MMGM<\/p>\n