Largest piece of Martian rock on Earth goes up for auction

• Sotheby's in New York is auctioning an "incredibly rare" 55-pound Martian rock, named NWA 16788, with an estimated sale price of over US$1.6 million (£1.2 million).
• Discovered in Niger in 2023, the reddish-brown meteorite travelled 140 million miles to Earth and is the largest piece of Mars ever found on our planet.
• The rock, an olivine-microgabbroic shergottite, represents nearly seven per cent of all Martian material currently on Earth and was previously exhibited at the Italian Space Agency.
• Also going on sale at Sotheby's is an 11-foot-long juvenile Ceratosaurus nasicornis skeleton, expected to fetch between $ 4million and $6 million.
• The dinosaur skeleton, found in Wyoming in 1996, dates back approximately 65 million years to the late Cretaceous period and will be auctioned on Wednesday.

IN FULL

Martian rock that crash landed in the Sahara listed to sell for around $2M at auction