MADISON, Wis. — A meteorite found in Wisconsin 15 years ago is now on display at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Geology Museum.
It’s the largest iron meteorite classified in the U.S. since 1981.
Jim Koch initially found the meteorite on his farm in Dane County in 2009 while out picking stones in the field. He and his wife, Jan Shepel, immediately knew it was an unusual find.
“109.5 pounds, it gets your attention,” Shepel said. “You know, if you maybe, if you had found little pieces of something, it would have escaped detection or whatever. But this one is hard to miss.”
They took the rock to a family member who is a scientist that works with rocks and metals. A sample of it was tested, and it confirmed it didn’t originate on earth. Then they sent the sample to the Chicago Field Museum, which officially confirmed it’s a meteorite.
When they reached out to museums across the Midwest, no one responded.
“We thought, okay, this is the one, you know, this is going to be the one where somebody gets excited about it, or whatever,” Shepel said. “It didn’t happen.”
So the meteorite sat in their garage for 14 years until the couple decided to reach out to the Geology Museum at UW-Madison.
Carrie Eaton is the museum curator.
“We were, of course, very excited,” she said. “We were out at the farm I think within a week. We visited Jim and Jan, and started working with them immediately on what they wanted to do with their amazing find.”
Eaton and her colleagues have been working on getting the meteorite classified, which is a detailed process involving scientists and experts. Eaton said you can learn a lot just from the rock’s surface.
“As this meteor was hurtling toward Earth, it was melting, that surface was melting, and ripples of molten metal were cascading across that surface,” she said. “Right as that meteor slows down, the temperature drops enough that it stops melting, and all of those features are frozen in place.”
The meteorite will eventually have a more permanent exhibit at the museum.
Koch and Shepel could have sold it to a dealer at a higher price, but they wanted it to remain near to where it was found and serve an educational purpose.
“We don’t want this to be on somebody’s mantle,” Koch said. “It should be in the museum where people can analyze it and enjoy it and discover it.”