INTRODUCTION

The Macovich Collection of Meteorites is the largest collection of aesthetic iron meteorites in the world. Numerous private and institutional collections contain specimens from The Macovich Collection, including the Smithsonian, the Natural History Museum (London), The Academy of Sciences (Beijing and Moscow) and the American Museum of Natural History (New York).

Nicolas Cage, James Taylor, Steven Spielberg, Jerry Bruckheimer, Yo-Yo Ma, Saud bin Mohammed al-Thani, the late Bill Ziff and Ripley's Believe it or Not Museums have also acquired meteorites with a Macovich provenance. The New York Times, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek and Smithsonian are among the publications that have written about The Macovich Collection and its curator, Darryl Pitt.

More meteorites with a Macovich provenance have been sold at traditional auctions—at more record-setting prices—than all other meteorites combined.

On May 17, 1998, at a Phillips auction in New York featuring The Macovich Collection, the American Museum of Natural History paid what is still the highest price ever paid for a complete slice of a meteorite at a public offering ($137,500). Two weeks later, at Butterfields in San Francisco, an 18-pound Macovich iron meteorite sold to a private collector in London for the record- setting price of $105,000. On January 24, 2000, at Butterfields in Chicago, one gram of Mars previously deaccessioned from the Natural History Museum (London) to the Macovich Collection sold for $16,000—more than 1,000 times the price of gold—a record for a specimen of Mars weighing one gram or less and deemed worthy of inclusion in Guinness's Book of World Records.

Meteorite research has enjoyed an extraordinary boon as an indirect result of Macovich offerings. It was the auctioning of Macovich specimens in the 1990s that became the catalyst to legions of new meteorite hunters to search the world’s deserts for more meteorites—resulting in many scientifically important specimens being recovered, including dozens of meteorites from the Moon and Mars. The sale of Macovich specimens is also uniquely responsible for select meteorites being accepted as fine sculptural forms. As a definitive measure of the ever-growing popularity of meteorites, Arts & Antiques, named a meteorite (with a Macovich provenance) as one of its "100 Top Treasures of the Year."

Curator Darryl Pitt is also the creator of the first interplanetary collectible, "Planet Mars: The Cube," a Lucite cube containing a sterile vial with 1/10 carat of igneous material from the fourth rock from the sun. In the book, The Art of Collecting Meteorites, legendary meteorite figure Robert Haag states, “There is no one who has done more to popularize meteorites than Darryl... except me!”