The Yale Peabody Museum’s meteorite collection in the Division of
Meteorites and Planetary Science was begun by Benjamin
Silliman in the early years of the 19th century with the fall of the Weston
meteorite on December 14, 1807, not far from New Haven, Connecticut.
Some
of the 30 or so meteorites acquired by Silliman over the next half century came
in mineral collections. The Gibbs Collection contained several sizeable pieces
of the Krasnojarsk pallasite as well as the largest unbroken specimen (36
pounds; 16 kilograms) of the Weston
meteorite. The Red River
meteorite is the largest acquired by Silliman, a 1,635-pound (742-kilogram)
iron found in Texas in 1808.
About 25 meteorites in the Division’s
collection are directly traceable to the efforts of Benjamin Silliman, Jr., who
succeeded his father as Professor of Chemistry at Yale in the 1850s. It is
certain that more passed through his hands, but documentation of these early
acquisitions is scanty.
Named Curator in 1874, Edward S. Dana more than
doubled the size of the meteorite collection in the next 46 years. Among his
most significant acquisitions were:
A collection of about 100 meteorites made by Yale mathematics professor
Hubert A. Newton was the gift of his family after his death.
Although for
much of the 20th century there was little interest in such collections, with the
advent of the space age meteorites became prime source material for geochemists
studying the history of the solar system. More than 200 meteorites and many
impact-related objects have been added to the Division’s holdings during the
current curatorship of the Peabody’s first Curator of Meteorites, geochemistry
professor Karl K. Turekian, including the former meteorite collection of
the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a gift in 1976. A special acquisition was Wethersfield
(1982). Connecticut’s most recent meteorite, it was the gift of the owners
of the house into which it fell — only a mile and a half away from a house hit
by another meteorite just 11 years earlier.
For a published catalog of
the collections in the Division of
Meteorites and Planetary Science see Postilla 101,
“The Meteorite and Tektite Collections of Yale University,” by Karl K. Turekian,
1966.
For significant specific holdings see:
The Yale Peabody Museum’s collections are available to legitimate researchers
for scholarly use. Loans are issued to responsible individuals at established
institutions. Loans and access to the collection can be arranged through the Curator.
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