Cascadia Precision Instrument Co. · Reference Library
Meteorite Sourcing & Authentication
Trust infrastructure, sourcing-channel tiers, marketplace pathology, and bench protocol for iron-meteorite acquisition. First document in the meteorites family.
Unmarked claims are Established (primary source or platform record)
Likely multiple independent lines
Unverified literature claim, no bench check
Refuted commonly repeated and wrong
01 · Scope & Method
This dossier maps where authentic meteoritic material can be bought with confidence, why the retail marketplaces are structurally hostile to that confidence, and what the bench can verify once material is in hand.
Standing caution — no object on the bench yet. The library rule that the object outranks the record has nothing to work with here: no meteorite specimen is yet in the collection. Every claim below is literature- or platform-derived and carries at best Established-against-its-document, not against metal. Q2 (acquire and verify a Muonionalusta reference specimen) is the gate to first-hand status.
02 · Trust Infrastructure
The hobby has a layered trust system. Unlike the instrument world, where authentication rests on maker records and the metal itself, the meteorite world has an actual scientific registry at its apex.
MetBull DB METEORITICAL SOCIETY
The nomenclature and classification authority
OperatorMeteoritical Society, Nomenclature Cttee.
Valid names80,093
Provisional6,191
URLlpi.usra.edu/meteor
What it is
- The authoritative registry of every officially recognized meteorite: name, classification, find locality and year, fall/find status, type-specimen repository. Analogous to a patent register: a dealer claim of "NWA 16530 lunar" either resolves to an entry or it does not.
- A classified meteorite has completed laboratory analysis (petrographic thin section + electron-microprobe mineral chemistry) and been accepted by the Nomenclature Committee. An unclassified stone has not — which does not make it fake, but removes the scientific paper trail.
Library rule mapping. MetBull entry = primary document. The standing rule "no patent number without a primary document" becomes: no classification claim without a MetBull entry. Any listed specimen citing a classification should be resolved against the database before purchase.
IMCA EST. ~2002 · IMCA.CO
International Meteorite Collectors Association — the dealer-vetting layer
Mechanics
- Members display a numbered logo; the number is verifiable against the public member list on imca.co.
- Admission requires referral by existing members, board vote, and questioning on knowledge and experience — an actual web of trust, unlike marketplace badges.
- Code of Ethics binds members to sell material that is "actually and exactly what is claimed," to refund or exchange within 30 days of legitimate dissatisfaction, and to cooperate with testing in disputed transactions.
Limits — do not over-claim this. IMCA polices only its own members and cannot verify specimens sold outside the group; community commentary (Galactic Stone) is explicit that membership is not a guarantee and that good non-member dealers exist. Treat the IMCA number as a strong prior, not a proof. Likely
COMMUNITY SELF-POLICING LAYER
Where fakes get dissected in public
- Korotev / Washington University "Some Meteorite Information" — lunar geochemist R. Korotev's site: a gallery of 1,000+ "meteorwrongs" (misidentified terrestrial rocks) with explanations, plus the largest photo archive of lunar meteorites, many preserved from dealer sites that no longer exist.
- Classification economics — classifiers are besieged by hopeful finders and mostly accept samples only from experienced collectors; formal classification (thin section + microprobe) is expensive. This is why commodity material is sold on trade identity ("Muonionalusta") rather than per-specimen lab work.
- Reputation is load-bearing — the dealer world is small; selling one fake ends a business. This is the same dynamic as the vintage-instrument trade, and it is why decades-old named dealers are the low-risk channel. Likely
03 · Verification Spine
Signals ranked by evidentiary weight, weakest first. The parallel to the dating spine: each row is a mark, and the right column is what the mark actually proves.
| Signal | Weight | What it actually proves |
|---|---|---|
| Search placement / ads | NIL | Ad budget. Marketplace ranking is paid placement plus relevancy. Refuted as a reputation proxy — in flooded categories it inverts, because churned shops must buy visibility. |
| Generic COA | NIL–LOW | Access to a printer. Anyone can produce one in minutes; community guidance treats COAs from unknown issuers as decorative. A COA is worth exactly the reputation of its issuer. |
| Star Seller / Top Rated badge | LOW | Operational hygiene: on-time shipping, response speed, review average. Says nothing about authenticity or expertise. A dropshipper with good logistics earns it. |
| Review corpus (count · age · content) | MED | Track record. Content matters more than count: look for buyers confirming accurate sizing, real etching, provenance paperwork. Weakness: reviews rarely test authenticity. |
| IMCA number (verified on imca.co) | HIGH | Sponsored admission, binding ethics code, refund obligation, dispute-testing obligation. Strong prior, not a proof. |
| MetBull entry + chain of custody | HIGH | The specimen's type exists and was lab-classified; the dealer can trace this stone to that entry. The best paper evidence available. |
| Bench verification (§06) | FINAL | The object outranks the record. Density + nickel chemistry + crystallographic pattern, run in this QA room. |
04 · Sourcing Channels
Reliable channels fall into three tiers by verifiability: established dealers with a long-standing public identity and professional documentation practices; marketplace sellers with long, verifiable sales records and consistently strong feedback; and — rarely — an individual marketplace shop whose review history can be independently confirmed. Newer or unverifiable shops, regardless of platform, carry materially higher risk (see §05).
05 · Marketplace Pathology
Why the meteorite category on Etsy is perpetually full of month-old, zero-review shops. Four mechanisms, compounding:
SUPPLY
Factory commodity in handmade costume. Slices and heat-blued cabochons are cut in volume by Chinese lapidary operations — the crystal-trade supply chain. One factory feeds dozens of storefronts; identical photos and identical dimension strings across "different" shops are the tell.
LOOPHOLE
The craft-supplies category. Etsy bans reselling mass-produced goods except in craft/party supplies. Meteorite slices listed as "jewelry inlay material" pass through the gap in the handmade requirement — note the ForeverCraftedUK listing carried exactly this categorization.
CHURN
Disposable storefronts. Mass-produced reselling risks suspension, so operators treat shops as consumable: suspended or review-burdened shops are abandoned and reincarnated under fresh Western-sounding names with claimed US/UK locations that game the ships-from filters. The observable result is a category where the median shop is weeks old.
NO GATE
Zero authenticity gatekeeping. Etsy disclaims responsibility for labeling accuracy; there is no COA verification and no classification requirement. The cost of the claim "genuine lunar meteorite" is zero.
The prominence inversion. Marketplace search ranking is paid placement ("relevancy and the amount sellers pay per click"). Dropship margins fund aggressive PPC; established sellers rank organically and advertise less. In this category, visibility and reputation are not merely uncorrelated — they tend to invert. Refuted: "the most prominent sellers are the most reputable."
Marketplace vetting sequence
1
Review corpus. Age > 1 year and count > 500? Zero-review or month-old shop → stop, or proceed only under buyer protection at throwaway stakes.
2
Review content. Do buyers confirm accurate dimensions, genuine etch, provenance paperwork? Generic praise ("fast shipping") carries no authenticity weight.
3
Coherence check. Claimed location vs. listing language vs. shipping origin. "UK" shop + machine-translated description + 2-week delivery window = relabeled dropship.
4
Price vs. anchor. Compare the asking price against typical retail pricing for that material type. Well below typical for a rare or classified type is the classic fake tell; near or slightly above typical for commodity material is normal retail.
5
Bench on arrival. §06 protocol. Buyer-protection windows are ~30 days; verify inside the window.
06 · Bench Protocol
Iron-meteorite verification, mapped onto the existing counterfeit-vetting workflow. Anatomy terms defined inline per library rule. Each test is stated with what it proves — and what it does not (rule 1.2).
| Test | Expected (octahedrite) | Proves | Does NOT prove |
|---|---|---|---|
| Magnet | Strongly ferromagnetic | Iron-based | Anything vs. steel — every steel fake passes. |
| Density (dim + mass) | ≈ 7.8 g/cm³ | Not pot metal, not plated zinc, not stone | Anything vs. steel (7.85 g/cm³) — indistinguishable at bench precision. |
| DMG nickel spot test | Positive · ≈ 8.4% Ni (Muonionalusta) | Nickel-bearing alloy. Kills carbon-steel and damascus fakes in minutes; kit ≈ $15. | Meteoritic origin — a deliberate Ni-steel (e.g. stainless) fake also reads positive. Chemistry alone is not the discriminator. |
| Pattern geometry | See criteria below | Octahedral single-crystal structure — the actual discriminator | Locality. Pattern proves iron-meteorite class, not that this stone is Muonionalusta specifically; locality rests on provenance. |
Pattern geometry criteria
An octahedrite is an iron meteorite whose nickel content sets up crystallization as intergrown plates aligned to the faces of an octahedron. Slow cooling (~1 °C per million years) segregates two alloys: kamacite (low-nickel iron, the visible lamellae — the bands) and taenite (high-nickel iron, the thin borders), with plessite (a fine kamacite–taenite intergrowth) filling the fields between. Acid etching attacks them at different rates, exposing the Widmanstätten pattern. No terrestrial process replicates the cooling rate, which is why the pattern cannot be forged properly — only imitated.
- Four orientations. Lamellae run in exactly four crystallographic directions (a plane cutting an octahedron), intersecting at angles consistent across the whole face. Repeating motifs or drifting angles = laser or roll-etched imitation.
- Dead-straight, non-repeating. Wavy parallel layering is damascus/mokume steel — the most common "meteorite" substitute in jewelry stock.
- Edge coherence. A sectioned single crystal shows the pattern continuing consistently across faces and terminating correctly at arrises. Faking multi-face coherence is effectively not done at commodity price points.
- Inclusions and fine structure. Schreibersite (iron-nickel phosphide) and troilite (iron sulfide) appear as pits and blebs; Neumann lines (fine shock-twinning striations in kamacite) may show under the loupe. Imitations do not bother.
- Coloration. Natural etched Muonionalusta is silver-grey. Blue/bronze/purple stock is heat-treated (tempering-oxide colors, same physics as bluing steel) — usually genuine metal underneath, but a cosmetic treatment that masks fine surface detail and wears. Note it in listings if reselling; swab DMG on an inconspicuous edge since it marks the oxide layer.
Full intersection (rule 1.2). Density + positive DMG + compliant four-direction pattern with edge coherence ≈ octahedrite established. Locality attribution ("Muonionalusta") remains Likely at best without provenance — band width class (fine octahedrite ≈ 0.3 mm kamacite bands) is consistent-with, not proof-of.
07 · Market Tiers
Material segments broadly into three price bands: common commodity material (slices and fragments of well-known falls), mid-tier material (oriented individuals, pallasite slices, witnessed falls), and high-value material (classified lunar/Martian, historic falls with provenance, museum-grade pallasites). Fraud risk rises sharply with price — the high tier is where faking actually pays, and purchases there should be IMCA-dealer-sourced, MetBull-resolved, and chain-of-custody documented.
08 · Open Questions & Ruled Out
| ID | Question | Method | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 | Does meteorite anatomy (kamacite, taenite, plessite…) join REF-ANA, or get its own namespace? | Ilya's call; affects build-anatomy.py merge behavior — instrument and meteorite part-ids share one keyspace. | MED |
| Q2 | Acquire a Muonionalusta reference specimen and run the full §06 protocol. | Purchase from Tier 1–2 dealer (control) and optionally one marketplace piece (test article); DMG kit; document as first specimens[] entries. | HIGH — gates first-hand status for the whole dossier |
| Q3 | Full IMCA member-directory pull to expand the roster with specializations. | imca.co member list; cross-reference against dealer sites. | MED |
| Q4 | Who operates the Etsy "Meteorites" shop, and are they IMCA? | Shop about-page; IMCA number check. | LOW |
| Q5 | Verify Sericho/Seymchan pallasite pricing anchors before any mid-tier purchase. | Compare 3+ Tier 1 dealer catalogs; anchors above are literature-derived. Unverified | MED |
Ruled out
| Lead | Why | Caution |
|---|---|---|
| Zero-review marketplace shops as a sourcing channel | Churn economics (§05): the shop may not exist by the time a problem surfaces; description accuracy unenforceable. | Do not re-chase; exception only as deliberate test articles under buyer protection. |
| Search prominence as a reputation signal | Paid placement; inverts in flooded categories. | Do not re-chase. |
| Generic COAs as authentication | Anyone can print one; value equals issuer reputation, which is already counted. | Do not double-count paper. |
09 · Revision History
| Rev | Date | Changes |
|---|---|---|
| A | 2026-07-23 | Initial issue. Literature-only; no specimen on the bench. New docType MKT and new family (meteorites) — both pending registration in LIBRARY.json. Sources: Meteoritical Bulletin DB, IMCA code of ethics, WUSTL/Korotev, dealer sites, eBay/Etsy platform records, retail-marketplace policy documentation; search snapshot 2026-07-23. Reissued same day under the inverted-default status convention (unmarked = Established; chips only for Likely / Unverified / Refuted / Open / Hypothesis) — the first draft chip-stamped Established claims throughout, which was noise. |
Anatomy terms introduced here (octahedrite, kamacite, taenite, plessite, Widmanstätten pattern, Neumann lines, schreibersite, troilite) are defined inline per §1.8 and staged in the sidecar pending the Q1 namespace decision. No specimen plates yet;
images/ ships empty.