Asteroid used as ham press worth $5.3m

Mar 30, 2013 |

A huge 100kg rock used by a Spanish farmer for more than three decades to press ham has turned out to be an asteroid worth a whopping $5.3 million.

Faustino Asensio Lopez found the massive rock, measuring 18-by-12.5-by-8 inches in 1980, while he was tending to livestock with his father in a field near Ciudad Real.
Believing the rock to be military scrap from the country’s civil war, his family members used it to cure meat for more than 30 years, New York Daily News reported.
However, it was only in 2011 when Lopez saw a TV report on meteorite sightings over Spain that he got in touch with geologist Juan Carlos Gutierrez Marco.

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