Any ideas? This was found covered in gold paint, buried in the ground where people detect for gold nuggets. I thought it was interesting enough that the paint should be removed, but there is still some gold paint stuck in the nooks and crannies.
It is very heavy (2 to 3 pounds)
Irregular shaped on one side.
Concave and smooth on the other.
It does attract a magnet.
I think there is the potential that someone picked this up somewhere (not knowing it may have been a meteorite) and used it as a joke.
Have anybody ever ran across something like this?
Any ideas on what it could be other than a meterorite.
Perhaps a by-product of a steel plant?
Looks/sounds like a "lodestone" to me, but that's just a guess...
Loyal
A quick Google tells me it should be magnetic if it were a "loadstone".
I agree it doesn't look much like the typical meteorites you see on the internet.
The only thing I can think of is it was a ball out of a ball mill that was deformed in some manner.
Just has my interest because I haven't found anything similiar yet.
The dude that planted that is getting the response that he hoped for.
Naw, he had it painted up bright gold and covered with mud, thinking he would get about 20 seconds of heart attack. That already happened. It was buried about 1.5' into a hillside of native ground.
Question is, where did he get this hunk of metal and what is it?
This is what you use when you want to play a mean joke on someone.
It's a native copper nugget that has been hot dipped in real gold.
It is heavy enough to fool someone that does not know better, but not nearly heavy enough to be real.
The construction crew building a bridge project buried it in the bottom of a 35' footing excavation, on bedrock, next to a river known for large nuggets and let a laborer find it.
This laborer had already found a small nugget and had a very bad case of gold fever.
He slipped the "nugget" into his pocket and didn't say a word...every once in awhile, he'd turn his back and pull the "nugget" out of his pocket just far enough to make sure it was real, then quickly pocket it again and go back to work. He finally went to the outhouse to give it a good look in private.
Those guys let the prank go on for about 45 minutes, then finally thought they better break the news before he told his boss where to go.
That was a cruel joke, but he handled it like a good sport.
The laborer (a smaller wirey guy), kept the fake "nugget" in his pocket and went to the other side of the river and spoke with the drilling sub-contractor's foreman, who was probably 6'-7" and 400 lbs. He leaned over and whispered to the guy and barely slipped the nugget out of his pocket to show the foreman. That guy instantly had gold fever. Pretty soon the whole drilling crew (a pretty rough looking crowd wearing what appeared to be gang colors)were constantly trying to pan out their drilling spoils for gold.
The next day, the laborer let the drilling foreman hold the "nugget". He offered to trade his work truck straight across for the gold.
I'm watching this whole thing go on and I see everyone on the drilling crew stop all the equipment and scramble over to the hillside and huddle looking at the ground. They keep picking something up and passing it around.
I had to go over an see what they were doing...they had found gold!!!only it was just the grindings from when they removed the yellow painted centerline.
Nobody let the drilling crew know the nugget was fake for fear that the foreman would get angry and thrown the laborer off the bridge.
Hard to be sure from a picture but if you were to cut it in half and see rings similar to tree rings, what you likely have there is a concretion. They form in iron rich rock where the iron migrates to form a nodule. I have some cool ones I found in the desert in Saudi.
> Any ideas? This was found covered in gold paint, buried in the ground where people detect for gold nuggets. I thought it was interesting enough that the paint should be removed, but there is still some gold paint stuck in the nooks and crannies.
I'm thinking it's not a hematite nodule, but a piece of slag from a smelter.
