“Brazen! It is brazen!” Professor Paul Sereno said down the phone line from Chicago.
He made no effort to disguise his anger that a rare meteorite from Mars discovered two years ago in the West African nation of Niger ended up being auctioned off in New York last month to an unnamed buyer, according to BBC.
The palaeontologist, who has close connections with the country, said it should be back in Niger.
This millions-of-years-old piece of the Red Planet, the largest ever found on Earth, fetched $4.3 million (3.2 million pounds) at Sotheby’s. Like the buyer, the seller was kept anonymous.
But it is unclear if any of this money went to Niger.
Sotheby's strongly disputes this, saying the correct procedures were followed, but Niger has now launched an investigation into the circumstances of the discovery and sale of the meteorite, which has been given the scientific and unromantic name NWA 16788 (NWA standing for north-west Africa).
An Italian academic article published last year said that it was found on 16 November 2023 in the Sahara Desert in Niger's Agadez region, 90km (56 miles) to the west of the Chirfa Oasis, by “a meteorite hunter, whose identity remained undisclosed.”
The article said NWA 16788 was “sold by the local community to an international dealer” and was then transferred to a private gallery in the Italian city of Arezzo.
A team of scientists from the University of Florence was able to examine it to learn more about its structure and where it came from. The meteorite was then briefly on display last year in Italy, including at the Italian Space Agency in Rome.
It was next seen in public in New York last month, minus two slices that stayed in Italy for more research.
Sotheby's said that NWA 16788 was “exported from Niger and transported in line with all relevant international procedures.”
A series of global agreements, including under the UN's cultural organization UNESCO, have tried to regulate the trade in these objects.
Niger passed its own law in 1997 aimed at protecting its heritage.
Sereno pointed to one section with a detailed list of all the categories included. “Mineralogical specimens” are mentioned among the art works, architecture and archaeological finds but meteorites are not specifically named.
In its statement on the Sotheby's sale, Niger admitted that it “does not yet have specific legislation on meteorites” - a line that the auction house also pointed out. But it remains unclear how someone was able to get such a heavy, conspicuous artefact out of the country without the authorities apparently noticing.
Morocco has faced a similar issue with the huge number of meteorites - more than 1,000 - found within its borders, which include a part of the Sahara.
Professor Hasnaa Chennaoui Aoudjehane has spent much of the past 25 years trying to hold on to some of that extraterrestrial material for her country.
In 2011, Chennaoui was responsible for gathering material in the desert from an observed meteorite fall that turned out to be from Mars.
Later named the Tissint meteorite, it weighed 7kg in all, but now she said only 30g remain in Morocco. Some of the rest is in museums around the world, with the biggest piece on display in London's Natural History Museum.
For his part, Sereno said he hopes that the Sotheby's sale will prove a turning-point - firstly by motivating the Nigerien authorities to act and secondly “if it ever sees the light of day in a public museum, [the museum] is going to have to deal with the fact that Niger is openly contesting it.”
