Space rocks go under the hammer
Some of the world's most famous meteorites are going under the hammer at a New York auction house in what is said to be the first sale of its kind.
The pieces are drawn from collections across the world and many examples are richly coloured and intricately patterned.
Price estimates range from $1.1m (£0.53m) for a 13-kilo (29-pound) piece to pebbles worth a few hundred dollars.
Some of the lots for sale at Bonham's fell to Earth thousands of years ago.
Only one is documented as having made a fatal impact.
The fatality, in the case of the Valera Meteorite which hit a field in Venezuela in 1972, was 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," Bonhams meteorite specialist Claudia Florian told the BBC's Radio Five Live.
Another piece in the 54-lot auction of "fine meteorites" comes from the l'Aigle Shower of 1803 in Normandy, France - a find which helped convince European scientists that rocks could, indeed, fall out of the sky.
Crown jewel
Some of the lots originated in the UK's Natural History Museum or the US Smithsonian Institution but many come from the Macovich collection in New York, built up by enthusiasts whose interest in the stones was as much aesthetic as scientific.
With a price estimate of $1.1m, the piece de resistance for Sunday's sale appears to be the "Crown Section" of America's famous Willamette Meteorite, discovered in Oregon in 1902.
The 13-kilo piece was cut from the rock as part of a meteorite exchange between the museum and collectors.
But that still leaves the American Museum of Natural History with about 15.5 tons (32,000 pounds) of the original.
Another US meteorite up for auction features naturally occurring gemstones, olivine and peridot. It was found outside Greensburg, Kansas, in 2005.
An altogether more humble offering are the tiny stones from a shower which hit Holbrook, Arizona, in 1912.
The smallest of these weighs just a gram with an estimated price of $350.
