The most affordable specimen we sell is also, in a real sense, the most extraordinary. An ordinary chondrite — the kind that costs less than dinner for two — formed 4.56 billion years ago, out of the same cloud of dust and gas that would go on to make the Sun and the planets. It is older than the Earth. Nothing you can buy at any price is older, because the solar system itself is barely older than the rock in your hand.
It is easy to lose the weight of that fact among the flashier specimens. Pallasites glow, irons show off their crystal lattices, Martian fragments carry the thrill of rarity. A chondrite just sits there looking like a grey pebble. But the grey pebble is a piece of the raw material the planets were built from, frozen and unaltered since before there was an Earth to be altered on. The chondrules inside it condensed directly out of the solar nebula.
This is why we tell every new collector to start with one, and to actually pick it up now and then. Rarity is exciting and provenance is important, but there is a particular quiet that comes from holding four and a half billion years in your palm and knowing, precisely, what it is. The oldest thing you can own costs almost nothing. That has always seemed to us like the best deal in the hobby.
