Last Updated: October 29, 2007
London, October 29: In what is being branded "the first sale of its kind", some of the world's most famous meteorites were sold at a New York auction house on Sunday.
While an iron meteorite from Siberia fetched 60,000 pounds, a US mailbox hit by a meteorite in 1984 sold for 40,000 pounds.
"The results were stronger than anticipated with a near-perfect result," the BBC quoted Bonhams meteorite specialist Claudia Florian as saying after the sale.
She also said that Bonhams hoped to sell the unsold lots "in the next several days".
Some of the 54 lots of "fine meteorites" sold at the auction house fell to Earth thousands of years ago, and only one out of them is documented as having made a fatal impact.
It is said that the Valera Meteorite, which hit a field in Venezuela in 1972, killed a cow.
"It's very rare to have a meteorite actually impact a living being... so now that particular meteorite is considered to be collectible," Florian told the BBC's Radio Five Live before the sale.
She also revealed that this piece was sold for 1,300 dollars.
With a price estimate of 1.1m dollars, the piece de resistance for the sale appeared to be the "Crown Section" of America's famous Willamette Meteorite, discovered in Oregon in 1902. It, however, did not sell.
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