NWA 3159/6964, eucritic impact melt
This is a stunning meteorite. It is comprised of a mess of light eucritic clasts surrounded by rivers of vesicular black melt. It is usually seen as < 5 gram cut stones or slices. We were lucky to come across a small lot of these stones while in Ouarzazate. Here’s the biggest one, at 39.877 grams.
2025 update: It’s Jason here. I made this page circa 2015. It’s ~ten years later, and I’m updating all of the pages on this website to improve SEO optimization. Having a page published for this meteorite seems a little weird, today. Why?
Samples of “rare” meteorite types were often ~unavailable when we started collecting in the 1990s. In general, they were much harder to find than they are today. If you wanted a piece of an uncommon type like a ureilite, there were ~a dozen known ureilites in total at the time, and most were curated by museums. There were…maybe three or four options available to collectors. If you were lucky, you could find a small part-slice of a US find like Kenna for $50-100 per gram. Maybe a small slice of one of the Australian finds from the Nullarbor for a similar price.
If you wanted a piece of a Lunar, you could buy a barely-visible speck of Calcalong Creek or one of the first Libyan Lunars — for somewhere between $10,000 and $100,000 per gram. 10 milligrams for $100…a real speck of the Moon!
If you wanted a CR-chondrite, there was really only one available – Renazzo, a historic witnessed fall that went for hundreds of dollars per gram, even back then.
But, around 2000, the African and Middle-Eastern floodgates started to open. Dealers set prices for most NWA rarities like ureilites and CR2s at ~$10-50 per gram (that would be $19 to $95 per gram in 2025 dollars). And Saharan hunters kept finding meteorites. Prices even for Lunars had dropped to around $1,000 per gram by ~2005. Since then, the meteorites have just kept coming. Wholesale prices for most Lunars are now something like $8-12 per gram, less in bulk. Prettier ones can still up to $60-100 per gram, but…that’s not most of them.
Back when I originally made this page, NWA HED achondrites like this stone were rare, and individuals were universally sliced and sold by European and American dealers for around $20-40 per gram. We were fortunate to come across this stone in Morocco for…quite a bit less. It was a nice addition to the collection. Nowadays, NWA achondrites like this are relatively common and inexpensive: as of 2025, you could probably buy a stone like this for $1 or $2 per gram directly from an NWA dealer on Facebook.
Heck, I saw a few intact ureilites being offered by Moroccan / Mauritanian sellers on Facebook earlier today. There are now around 700 published ureilites, most of which are currently available, or were readily available when they were found, but have since been distributed. I’ve picked several new ones out of unclassified bins over the years, but they’re not really a great find at this point, since prices for identified ureilites from NWA sellers have dropped to maybe $1-3 per gram. They’re probably still worth picking out of unclassified bins at mineral shows, but…times have changed.
Just thought this might be worth talking about for newer collectors. This is still a nice stone, but I wouldn’t even bother making a page for something like it today: it’s a good time to be a collector.
39.877 grams