Taza, Ungrouped Iron

Meteoritical Bulletin entry for Taza.

Long story short, it’s an ungrouped iron with a germanium content an order of magnitude or so above most iron meteorites.  One other iron, Butler, from Missouri, has a similar composition.  Some Taza specimens contain rare olivine crystals, usually associated with troilite inclusions.

Here are some cute small Tazas.

And this is the largest known individual from the find.*  It’s essentially a ~2 ½-foot-long oriented ‘bullet.’  We don’t have an exact weight on it, but it weighs between 71 and 77 kilograms.  I apologize for the quality of the images; I took a few photos  while the iron was outside for about an hour during some remodeling.  It’s another one that’s hard to move..

And here’s a small individual in the collection that was apparently featured on a set of postage stamps from Benin.  They never asked me for permission or told me about it, but it’s kind of cool..

*A larger mass of Taza was found several years after we acquired the seventy-odd kilogram one, and it was purchased by a meteorite dealer in China.  Long story short, it was destroyed and turned into novelties: small slices, jewelry, and trinkets like paper knives and dog tags.  So the above individual is once again the largest known mass of Taza.  The bigger one was a nice iron.  What happened is sad: