How many meteorites have been found?
More than 85,000 meteorites were listed in the international catalogue by 2026, including some with provisional names. Only around 1,300 of them were seen to fall; the rest are finds.
Recognised meteorites are registered with the Meteoritical Society, the international body that approves names and classifications. Its catalogue held more than 85,000 entries by 2026, including some that still carry provisional names. The number grows every year: the society approved about 3,600 new meteorites in 2024 and nearly 2,000 in 2025.
Those numbers hide an important split. A fall is a meteorite that someone saw come down and then recovered; a find is one picked up later with no record of its arrival. Falls are the rarer kind. Only about 1,300 approved meteorites are witnessed falls, collected over several centuries. Everything else is a find.
Most finds come from two kinds of landscape. Antarctica has given up tens of thousands, because moving ice gathers meteorites together and dark stones are easy to spot on blue ice. Hot deserts such as the Sahara and the deserts of Oman and Chile have given up tens of thousands more, because dry air slows weathering and there is little plant cover to hide a stone. That is why so many names begin with "NWA", short for Northwest Africa, used for desert finds whose exact location is unknown.
One name does not always mean one rock. A single fall can shower an area with hundreds or thousands of fragments, all sharing one name, as happened at Sikhote-Alin in Russia in 1947. Different finds can also turn out to be pieces of the same fall, which scientists call paired meteorites. So the true number of separate arrivals is smaller than the list suggests. Even so, it is a remarkable library: tens of thousands of samples from asteroids, the Moon and Mars, most of them gathered in the last fifty years.