A newly found meteorite is at least 4.6billion years old and will help us understand how Earth was formed, scientists have claimed.
The incredible piece of volcanic rock was discovered at Erg Shish, in south west Algeria, last year, and investigators have just announced how important it is.
Geochemistry professor Jean-Alix Barrat, of France’s University of Western Brittany, said: "I’ve been working on meteorites for more than 20 years now, and this is possibly the most fantastic new meteorite I have ever seen."
The fragment of rock is actually older than Earth, and formed just a couple of million years after the creation of the Solar System itself, said Dr Barrat.
"When you go close to the beginning of the Solar System, it’s more and more complicated to get samples. We probably won’t find another sample older than this one."
Dr Barrat and his colleagues have spent the past year analysing the meteorite, which has been dubbed Erg Chech 002, or EC 002.
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It was found in an isolated stretch of the Sahara Desert and is made of a rock called andesite, which was once molten before solidifying around 4.6billion years ago.
EC 002 – which would have taken at least 100,000 years to solidify – is likely to be part of the crust of a protoplanet in the Solar System that broke up.
Thought to have landed in the desert around a century ago, it is currently in 43 fragments, with the largest being "as big as a fist", said Dr Barrat.
It is green in appearance when cut, with a brown surface, he added, saying that "such rocks were quite common early in the history of the solar system", and will thus help to explain it better.
The "parent body" of EC 002 could have been up to 80 miles long, according to co-researchers Marc Chaussidon and Johan Villeneuve.
By studying its composition, scientists deduce that it travelled for more than 4.5 billion years "in a pile of gravel, protected from solar radiation".
The rock that was then exposed to the sun continued on its way through space before falling to Earth.
Most of the meteorites that have landed on Earth are made of a volcanic rock called basalt, and no other known asteroid looks like EC 002.
