On October 3, 1962, a farmer in Zagami, Nigeria was nearly struck by an 18-kg meteorite as it plummeted to Earth. As was reported in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s “2012 Martian Meteorite Compendium,” Robert Haag, world-famous meteorite collector, traveled to Nigeria in 1988 and met the farmer. Haag related what the farmer told him of his experience: “He was trying to chase the cows out of his cornfield when he heard a tremendous explosion and was buffeted by a pressure wave. Seconds later, there was a puff of smoke and a thud, as something buried itself in the soft dirt only ten feet away. Terrified that it was an artillery shell or bomb, the man waited for a few minutes before going to investigate. What he saw was a black rock at the bottom of a two-foot hole. The local commissioner was summoned and the specimen was recovered and sent to the provincial capital, where it was placed in the museum.”

Haag also went to the local museum in Kaduna, Nigeria where he successfully acquired a large portion of the meteorite in an exchange. In 1995, a historic scientific study was published in Science entitled “Signatures of the Martian Atmosphere in Glass of the Zagami Meteorite”. It was long believed that an exotic group of meteorites were likely to be specimens of Mars, and in 1983 proof started rolling in. Minute amounts of gas were found in tiny glassy inclusions of a suspected Martian meteorite. The gas was analyzed and found to match perfectly with the signature of the Martian atmosphere as reported by NASA’s Viking missions.

Zagami crystallized from basaltic magma 175 million years ago. Indeed, this specimen originated from a volcano on Mars and was ejected off the Martian surface three million years ago following the impact of a large asteroid. As a poetic gesture, when NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft entered a Martian orbit in 1997, included as part of its cargo was a sample of Zagami. The Global Surveyor’s mission ended in 2007; its orbit around Mars will slowly decay and it will slam into Mars in about thirty years and return a portion of Zagami to its birthplace. This thick slab features a long sloping edge of fresh fusion crust. Its matrix is a homogenous heather gray except for a vein of impact melt precisely of the variety known to contain tiny volumes of the atmosphere of the planet Mars.

Christie's would like to thank Dr. Alan E. Rubin at the Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles for his assistance in preparing this catalogue.

39 x 35 x 8mm (1.5 x 1.33 x 0.33 in.) and 24.18g (120 carats)