Can a meteorite be a fossil?
Yes, in a way. In Sweden, scientists have found more than 100 'fossil meteorites' in limestone about 467 million years old.
Fossils are remains of ancient living things, such as bones or shells, preserved in rock. Meteorites are not alive, but some ancient meteorites have been preserved in rock in a very similar way, so scientists call them fossil meteorites.
The most famous ones come from a limestone quarry in southern Sweden. The limestone formed on an ancient sea floor about 467 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs. At that time, an unusually large number of meteorites were falling on Earth, after a big collision broke apart an asteroid in space.
Some of these meteorites landed in the sea, sank into the mud and were buried. Over millions of years, the mud became limestone. Water slowly replaced most of the meteorites' minerals with Earth minerals, just as bones can be turned to stone. But one very tough mineral, called chromite, survived unchanged. By studying the chromite, scientists showed the fossils were once a type of meteorite called an L chondrite.
More than 100 fossil meteorites have been found in the quarry since the 1980s. Workers spot them as dark round patches on the limestone. They help scientists learn about events in the asteroid belt hundreds of millions of years ago.