When Australian prospector David Hole stumbled on a heavy reddish rock in Maryborough Regional Park back in 2015, he was convinced he’d struck gold. The region sits in the heart of Victoria’s historic Goldfields, and the rock’s unusual weight made him believe there had to be a nugget hidden inside.
Hole tried everything he could to crack it open. He reached for a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, even acid. He eventually swung a sledgehammer at it. Nothing worked. The rock stubbornly refused to break apart, leaving Hole puzzled and eventually leaving it untouched for years.
It was only when he took the object to the Melbourne Museum that he learned the truth. The “rock” wasn’t gold at all. It was a rare meteorite.
According to geologist Dermot Henry, who examined the specimen, it displayed the classic sculpted, dimpled exterior that forms when a space rock melts slightly while plunging through Earth’s atmosphere. After 37 years of examining thousands of rocks brought in by hopeful visitors, Henry said only two had ever turned out to be actual meteorites. This was one of them.
Once museum researchers cut off a small slab using a diamond saw, everything became clear. The object weighed 17 kilograms and was classified as an H5 ordinary chondrite, a type of meteorite rich in iron and dotted with tiny metallic mineral droplets called chondrules. The team later published a scientific paper on the 4.6-billion-year-old space rock, officially naming it the Maryborough meteorite.
Dermot Henry and Melbourne Museum geologist Bill Birch with the Maryborough meteorite. (Museums Victoria)
Meteorites like this are far more valuable than gold, not for their market price but for the scientific clues they contain. As Henry explained, they offer a way to study the early history of our Solar System, including materials even older than Earth itself. Some meteorites even carry organic molecules such as amino acids, the building blocks of life.
Carbon dating suggests the Maryborough meteorite may have landed sometime between 100 and 1,000 years ago. It likely originated in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter before being nudged toward Earth by ancient collisions.
Only 17 meteorites have ever been found in the Australian state of Victoria, making this discovery exceptionally rare. As Henry put it, the odds of Hole stumbling upon it were “astronomical.”
For anyone with a strange, unusually heavy rock lying around, this might be a good time to take a second look. It could be far more than meets the eye.