Slice of Abee meteorite will be auctioned off

A slice of one of Canada’s most famous meteorites — a large chunk of which was traded by the Geological Survey of Canada in 1997 to acquire a major U.S. collection of space rocks — is to be sold for up to $8,000 on Monday at a Bonhams auction in New York.

The planned sale of a 192-gram piece of the Abee meteorite is just the latest chapter in the remarkable saga of the globally unique geological specimen.

It is believed to have been catapulted into space by an explosion on the planet Mercury during the birth of our solar system, and which landed 4.6 billion years later — at precisely 11:05 p.m. on June 9, 1952 — in a wheat field about 90 kilometres north of Edmonton.

The 107-kilogram object was found at the bottom of a two-metre hole by Abee farmer Harry Buryn and later sold to the Ottawa-based Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) for a thenlofty price of $1,062 — becoming one of the showcase items in Canada’s national meteorite collection and the subject of dozens of scientific studies over the decades.

But its value to Canadian meteorite research would prove even greater when a 20-kilogram fragment — nearly one-fifth of the extraterrestrial treasure — was sold to a U.S. collector in 1997 as part of a three-way deal orchestrated by GSC geologist Richard Herd, curator of Canada’s national meteorite collection, that added 950 new specimens to the federal repository, nearly doubling its size.

The piece of “Abee” to be sold in New York isn’t the only notable Canadian rock on offer at Bonhams’ “Cabinet of Natural Curiosities” auction on Monday.

An eerie, 10-centimetre-tall sculpture of a human skull made from what’s described as “the oldest rock in the world” — a piece of four-billion-year-old gneiss chiselled from the shore of the Acasta River in the Northwest Territories — is expected to sell for up to $4,500.

The skull, carved by Indonesian artist Lee Downey, is made of material sourced from a streaked strand of ancient rock located about 300 km north of Yellowknife.

“Found in 1989,” Bonhams states in its catalogue entry for the skull sculpture, “the Hadean age rock outcrop where it was gathered is the oldest known intact crustal fragment on Earth, dating back 4.02 billion years.”

Scientists have not definitively determined that the Abee meteorite comes from Mercury, but its composition suggests it originated at or near the small, solid planet.