Santa Rosa

This meteorite was found in Tunja, Boyaca, Colombia in 1810. A single large mass weighing ~750 kilos and several other smaller masses were found on Tocavita hill near Santa Rosa in 1810 and in 1824 the larger mass was used as an anvil in town. In 1874 it was placed on a column in the town square where Henry Ward saw it in 1909. He persuaded the mayor to sell him the mass and in the middle of the night he threw a party for the townspeople. During the party a team of horses were used to topple the column and put the meteorite on a cart. The next morning the enraged townspeople sent soldiers to retrieve the mass which was on it's way to Bogotá. Ward managed to convince them to allow him to cut off part of this mass which he did.

Most of the mass today is in Bogota, with Ward's original pieces chopped up and distributed to museums worldwide.

The Santa Rosa meteorite is an Polycrystalline iron with cohenite and graphite. Buchwald debunks the Ataxite classification based on the fact that the pieces studied in Europe were all heated and deformed due to the use as an anvil, it is not an ataxite. It has a beautiful etch pattern clearly octahedrite but altered.

It is still listed in the Catalog of Meteorites as an Ataxite (IC) anom.

This is a very historic meteorite, although a large amount exists, it is virtually never seen on the meteorite market as it is almost all locked in museums around the world.