Chris inquired: "Can anyone tell me when the word 'fossil' was first used to describe meteorites of this kind?
It looks like this word has never been used at any time before the late 20th century to describe meteorites. Best regards, Bernd BUCHWALD V.F. (1975) Handbook of Iron Meteorites, Volume 3, pp. 1403-1408: Monturaqui: Taenite ribbons and plessite fields occurred locally; the fields were up to 1.1 x 0.4 mm in size, but were "fossil"; i.e., what remained was really only the high-nickel rim zones and the retained taenite (austenite) around martensite of high-nickel, high-carbon morphology. Thorslund, P., Wickman, F.E. (1981) Middle Ordovician chondrite in fossiliferous limestone from Brunflo, central Sweden (Nature, 289:285- 286). Catalogue of Meteorites (5th ed.) - Mar'inka: Cosmogenic Mn-53 is also similar to Sikhote-Alin values; it gives a terrestrial age of < 10 m.y. Alekseev et al. conclude that Mar'inka cannot be a fossil meteorite, but is probably a fragment of Sikhote-Alin, while some details of its trace element chemistry differ from Sikhote-Alin (Met.Bull. 72, Meteoritics 27, 1992). SICREE A.A. et al. (1997) Potential for preservation and recovery of fossil iron meteorites from coal, trona, limestone and other sedimentary rocks (Meteoritics 32-4, 1997, A121): .. Lake Murray (Oklahoma), a IIB coarsest iron (10 mm) found in Cretaceous sandstone and the oldest known 'paleoiron' [Ref.: LaPaz L. (1953) Meteoritics 1, pp. 109-113]. KRING D.A. et al. (1998) Gold Basin Meteorite Strewn Field: The 'Fossil' remnants of an asteroid that catastrophically fragmented in Earth's atmosphere (Lunar and Planetary Science XXIX, in press, 1998). GOLD D.P. et al. (1999) A strategy for the search and recovery of fossil iron meteorites in sedimentary rocks (MAPS 34-4, 1999, A044). NORTON O.R. (1999) The Lake Murray octahedrite - a "fossil" meteorite (M! Nov. 1999, Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 22-23). STEPNIEWSKI M. et al. (2000) Preliminary study of a new enstatite meteorite from Zaklodzie - southeast Poland (MAPS 35-5, 2000, Suppl., A152): "...According to the present results, Zaklodzie could be a fossil stone altered by weathering processes (W1/W2) and preserved in quaternary loess sediment ..." HECK PH.R. et al. (2003) Evidence for the L-chondrite parent body breakup event? Cosmic-ray exposure ages of 480 Myr old fossil meteorites (MAPS 38-7, 2003, A044). ______________________________________________ http://www.meteoritecentral.com Meteorite-list mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
