Oregon Public Broadcasting

Researchers say a 40-pound rock found 10 years ago in a Central Oregon wheat field is really a meteorite.

The Morrow County Meteorite as it’s being called is only the fifth such specimen to be found in Oregon since the first was discovered more than 115 years ago. Reporter David Nogueras has more.

Thousands of meteors hit the earth each day. Most burn up in the atmosphere and can be seen as shooting stars.  But one in a thousand reach the earth’s surface as meteorites.

These distinctive rocks usually stick out from the landscape, but in Oregon they’ve proven to be elusive.  They can be hidden in among the dense forests in the West and the myriad of dark colored volcanic rocks in the East.

Alex Ruzika is an assistant professor at Oregon State University and the director of the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory. He says the Morrow Meteorite is about the size of a basketball and is shaped kind of like a cone.

Alex Ruzika: "Sometimes when meteorites come though the atmosphere they actually become oriented, kind of like if you have an Apollo capsule coming back from the moon you know it’s shaped in a certain way so it’s stable."

Ruzika and his team identified the specimen as a Condorite. That’s a unique rock type that only formed in the earliest moments of solar system’s history. 

The Meteorite remains with man who found it, but OSU is keeping a smaller sample for posterity.