An attractive example from the largest meteorite shower of the last several thousand years, and one of the most terrifying meteorite showers of modern times. Its journey began 320 million years ago, when a giant iron mass broke-off from its parent body in the asteroid belt and wandered through interplanetary space until it encountered Earth on February 12, 1947. Upon slamming into the atmosphere at cosmic velocity (~11 miles/second) it began to break apart, producing a fireball brighter than the Sun as it sailed over Siberia’s Sikhote-Alin Mountains. The shockwaves from the low altitude explosion of the main mass collapsed chimneys, shattered windows and uprooted trees. Sonic booms were heard more than 300 kilometers away and a 33-kilometer-long smoke trail persisted in the sky for several hours. The resulting meteorites produced impact craters as large as 26 meters — with nearly 200 craters having been catalogued. A famous painting of the event by artist and eye-witness P. I. Medvedev was reproduced as a postage stamp issued by the Soviet government in 1957 to commemorate what many witnesses thought was the end of the world. There are two types of Sikhote-Alin meteorites: the jagged and twisted specimens that resulted from the low-altitude explosion of the main mass (see lot 34), and the gently scalloped specimens that broke free of the main mass in the upper atmosphere and were sculpted during their plunge to Earth as a result of frictional heating, this being an an example of the former.