Guy holds onto a mystery rock for years thinking it was gold — only to realize it's far more precious

The common perception is that gold is the most precious metal around, but turns out there's something even more valuable, even though it doesn't glitter. Back in 2015, an Australian man named David Hole set out on a quest to find gold. With a metal detector, he scoured the Maryborough Regional Park in Melbourne which is known for its famous Australian gold rush site which attracted a lot of attention in the 19th century.

Even though he just spotted a reddish rock between yellow clay, something told the man that he had struck gold. He then picked up the rock that was only 39 cm long and 14 cm wide and found that it weighed 17 kg for some reason. He later took it home and tried to crack it open after being convinced that there was a gold nugget inside the rock. Hole tried to open it with an angle grinder, and a drill and even dunked the thing in acid. However, he failed to crack it at all, because what he thought of as a gold nugget was a rare meteorite. "It had this sculpted, dimpled look to it," Melbourne Museum geologist Dermot Henry told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2019. "That's formed when they come through the atmosphere, they are melting on the outside, and the atmosphere sculpts them," he added. After 37 years of working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, Henry said that he had only found two real meteorites and this was one of the two. "If you saw a rock on Earth like this, and you picked it up, it shouldn't be that heavy," Melbourne Museum geologist, Bill Birch added.

The researchers later published a scientific paper describing the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, which they named Maryborough after the town in which it was found. Once open, one could see the tiny crystallized droplets of metallic minerals throughout it, called chondrules. "Meteorites provide the cheapest form of space exploration. They transport us back in time, providing clues to the age, formation, and chemistry of our Solar System (including Earth)," Henry said. "Some provide a glimpse at the deep interior of our planet. In some meteorites, there is 'stardust' even older than our Solar System, which shows us how stars form and evolve to create elements of the periodic table. Other rare meteorites contain organic molecules such as amino acids; the building blocks of life," he added.

While it's still unknown where the meteorite actually came from and how long it may have been on the earth, they have made some sound guesses. "This particular meteorite most probably comes out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it's been nudged out of there by some asteroids smashing into each other, then one day it smashes into Earth," Henry explained. So there's a good chance that the meteorite fell on earth around 1,000 years ago. According to the researchers, this meteorite is rarer than gold, making it far more valuable than the yellow metal.