George Thurland Prior (1862-1936) was one of the first scientists to classify meteorites based on their chemical composition. Working at the Museum as Keeper of Mineralogy from 1857, when the post was created, until 1880, he was one of the first people to study meteorites by slicing them into thin sections for the microscope.ĭuring this time, he also greatly expanded the Museum's mineral collection, tripling its size in his first six years and adding at least 43,000 specimens in total. Mervyn Herbert Nevil Story-Maskelyne (1823-1911) was a driving force in the development of optical mineralogy - the study of minerals and rocks under a microscope. This helped ignite scholarly interest in meteorites and their origins, eventually leading to the development of meteoritics as a discipline. He commissioned a worldwide comparison of these stones from the sky and found them to be similar to each other but not to rocks on Earth. This prompted scientist Joseph Banks to investigate. Previously, many people believed that rocks that fell from the sky had been ejected into the air by nearby volcanoes - but there are no active volcanoes in Yorkshire. Its discovery helped confirm that meteorites come from space. The Wold Cottage meteorite, which fell in 1795 near Wold Cottage farm, Yorkshire, was the first recorded meteorite fall in the UK. How old is the Earth? How did it come to have water? Meteorites may hold clues to these age-old questions.ĭr Caroline Smith, meteorite expert Explore
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