Mark Note: Hello List, Here are Dean's thoughts on the subject. John and me received this e-mail but since no one else did I thought I would now forward it, sorry for the little delay, busy monday.
Thanks, Mark Not sure about ozouna but my beleif is that most the NWA Rs are all paired. Last winter there was loads of the R chondrite around morocco that the local moroccan dealers were selling for $2 a gram (Probably well over 50 kilos - maybe as much as a hundred. It was just so common last winter that everybody thought that it would last forever but it is pretty much all gone now. At least i havent been offered much lately and that is usually a good indication that it has dried up). It seems to have dried up recently and the wholesale price in morocco is triple that now and it has gotten hard to find now. I just obtained a kilo of small weathered fragments from people who searched the strewnfield and it appears to be the small left over fragments in the strewnfield so from what I have seen I suspect that the strewnfield has been pretty much hunted out. My pieces are pretty weathered and there are several different qualities of the meteorite. The least weathered stuff is totally indistinguisable visually from the R4 and the more weathered browner stuff is visually identical to the R3.9 from morocco (Visual and magnetic analysis - if a scientist looked at it there obviously could be something different found). So I have fragments where the cut surface look the same as both the R4 and the R3.9 and I am told that they are from the same strewnfield. So my persobal beleif is that the R4 and R3.9 meteorites from morocco are all paired. I do however have an R5 which is unusually equiliuberated with loads of shock veins and is not paired with the usual R that has been floating around morocco for over a year now (With various NWA numbers). My NWA1585 is certainly not paired with the rest of the R chondrites so there is more than one strewnfield. But I strongly suspect that the ones that I am selling on ebay as "Besseys non magnetic NWA" is paired with the R3.9 and R4 that we are all familiar with. Of course if I had more actual scientific analysis I could well change my mind but since I have a lot of pieces that wont be happening. This is an exceptionally nice meteorite of a classification that would have cost you $300 a year and a half ago and is now available for under $10 a gram. And it is no longer plentiful in morocco like it was last winter and the strewnfield appears hunted out. This might be one that you want to add to your collection now cheap. It is often very hard to figure out the pairing data of the NWAs and without scientific help from the worlds underfunded institutions it has unfortunately became necessary for dealers to make educated guesses as to NWA pairings. Cheers DEAN ______________________________________________ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
