Greetings Mohamed and List,

Mohamed opined:

> The little spheroids do not have any layers inside, when I
> break one of them I get a reflecting crystalline surface,
> milky white to gray in color(pyroxenes as I believe). In
> addition to that they are not affected at all by a
> dilluted HCl.

Fine, it's not an oolite.  My guess was based on similar
morphology, but the scale is wrong.  Your spheroids are
too large.  The point is that your ROCK is clearly not a
meteorite -- not even remotely close to looking like one.
As others have pointed out before, you do not seem to be
making much progress toward finding meteorites despite
spending what appears to be a fair amount of time looking
for them.  Oman has plenty of meteorites, so that's not
the problem.  Your problem is that you don't have a good
search image -- you keep gravitating to the same types of
terrestrial rocks, and spending an inordinate amount of
time (yours and ours) trying to convince yourself that they
just might be meteorites.  You'll never find one this way.

My advice?  Buy a variety of common Dhofar meteorites off
eBay or from one of the many fine dealers in the world and
really LOOK at them.  Study their texture, their shapes,
their heft, their color.  Memorize them.  Then take them
with you to a place where Oman meteorites have been found
before.  Preferably choose a place that isn't littered
with dark rocks and start searching.  Every 15 minutes or
so, refresh your memory of what you're looking for by
staring at your *known* meteorites.  It is easy to diverge
from your search image when you're staring at lots of
terrestrial rocks.  Remember, meteorites are rare.  Your
only chance at finding them is by covering LOTS of area.
That's why it's important to choose your area wisely, and
not waste valuable time on rocks that only superficially
resemble meteorites.

A final bit of advice:  there are a lot more meteorites
that are smaller than 100 grams than larger.  Adjust your
search image to be realistic with those statistics.

When all is said and done, I think your experience will
be that your first meteorite will find YOU rather than
the other way around.  Some day you'll just be walking
along, searching, your mind wandering from one random
thought to another, and VOILA!  You'll stop dead in
your tracks.  Your heart will jump.  You won't have to
make excuses for it or talk yourself into it -- you'll
know it's a meteorite before you even touch it...

--Rob



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