The Winchcombe crater is not the first to be taken to a museum in England

 

The BBC reported that the part of the driveway where the Winchcombe meteorite landed is being preserved. This is not the first case of a crater being taken to a museum.

In Yorkshire on March 14^th 1881 a meteorite fell next to the North Eastern Railway line in Middlesbrough (Middlesbrough was in Yorkshire then) not only was the Middlesbrough meteorite ‘captured’.  The crater that the  meteorite made was also ‘captured’, a one yard cube of earth containing the crater was taken to the Yorkshire Museum .

Both meteorite and crater were displayed at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in York in 1881.

It is possible to to see the Middlesbrough meteorite at the Yorkshire Museum today. A cast of the crater still exists in the museum.

The Middlesbrough meteorite is one of the most important on Earth it is classed as a textbook example of an oriented meteorite. Only one side of the object was burned as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere.