INTRODUCTION

The Macovich Collection of Meteorites is indisputably the foremost 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).

James Taylor, Steven Spielberg, Nicolas Cage, Jerry Bruckheimer, Yo-Yo Ma, Saud bin Mohammed al-Thani and Ripley's Believe it or Not Museums have all acquired meteorites with a Macovich provenance. U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, The New York Times, USA Today and Smithsonian Magazine 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 than all other meteorites sold at such auctions 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 $97,500--also a record. At Butterfields in Chicago, a 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—an event deemed worthy of inclusion in Guinness's Book of World Records.

Meteorite research has recently enjoyed a tremendous boon as an indirect result of Macovich offerings. The media's extensive coverage of the auctioning of meteorites in the 90s--and high prices attained--by curator Pitt became the catalyst to a legion of new meteorite hunters to search the world’s deserts for more meteorites, resulting in the recovery of many scientifically important specimens including dozens of meteorites from the Moon and Mars. The sale of Macovich specimens is also uniquely responsible for choice meteorites being embraced as fine sculptural forms. A sculptural specimen with a Macovich provenance was named by Arts & Antiques as one of its "100 Top Treasures of the Year." In late 2007 at Bonhams, another highly aesthetic Macovich specimen sold for $105,000.

Curator 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!