Thank you for your interest in rocks and minerals! Due to schedule and location limitations, we don’t have a great setup here for drop-in rock (or fossil or meteorite) identifications. But we’d encourage you to take your samples to our friends at the Idaho Museum of Mining and Geology, by the Old Idaho Penitentiary. Admission to the IMMG is FREE, and they love having people drop by to ask questions. They can also show you some cool rocks and fossils from the area. Ask for our friend Coyote!
The IMMG staff recommends coming in on Fridays or Saturdays from 12-4 pm, but feel free to reach out to operations@idahomuseum.org to make sure that someone will be available at the museum in advance. And check out their website for an array of events, including lectures, field trips, and rock/mineral/fossil identification classes.
If the staff at the IMMG cannot answer your questions, then you might have a pretty interesting sample on your hands! In that case, please reach out to us again, and we’ll put you in touch with a professor who might be able to help. Keep in mind that we get so many requests along these lines that it’s difficult to keep up. So it really helps when people reach out to the IMMG first.
Thanks again for your interest, and we hope you learn something fascinating about your samples!
You may think the following statements are evidence that a rock is possibly a meteorite:
- “It’s attracted to magnets.”
- “It’s black.”
- “It’s heavy.”
However, many normal terrestrial rocks have these properties, including basalt (aka black lava rock), which is a very common normal terrestrial rock in southern Idaho and the Pacific Northwest. Basalt is erupted from volcanoes, and there were many in geologically recent time here. You can see remnants of basalt and other volcanic rocks from the hills above Mountain Home to the canyons of the Snake, Bruneau, Owyhee, Malheur, and Payette rivers. Earth rocks have a wide variety of appearances and compositions, so a “weird” rock is not necessarily a meteorite.
To prevent a meteor shower of samples arriving in our offices, there is a form to fill out and photos to send in first. Please take several good quality photos using a standard item for scale (such as a quarter or ruler). Take the photos up close, if possible, and from different perspectives or angles.
Our geologists may be able to identify the sample from the photo and determine whether additional inspection is warranted. Thanks for your cooperation.
Before submitting your sample, please do your own research into identifying rocks and mineral and meteorites. There are many good introductory books and online resources. There are also local rock shops and gem clubs.
Our faculty are highly trained in rock and mineral identification, including general types of meteorites, but they also have many other duties, such as teaching and doing research, and are very busy. Consequently, we are limited to visual inspection of your samples. We do not provide chemical analyses or assay services for rocks of any type. Please contact a commercial assay office or mining consultant for that service. Please do not submit samples that have been purchased, and do not request any type of “certification.”
If you still think you have a meteorite, please check out Arizona State University’s Identifying Meteorites webpage. ASU has a highly regarded planetary geology program and has faculty with research interests in that area.
This Washington University of St. Louis meteorite webpage has photos and explanations of why the many rocks submitted to them are meteorwrongs.
ALS Global is a commercial analytical lab and a resource to have your specimen professionally analyzed. However, many meteorites overlap in chemical composition with terrestrial rocks.
There is a nice display of meteorites at the Idaho Museum of Mineral & Geology, at the Old Penitentiary in east Boise. Visit the Idaho Museum website for more information.
Please fill out our Meteorite or Meteorwrong form for inquiries. We do not take walk-ins.