Individual
An individual is a complete meteorite that landed as a separate piece, usually crusted all over.
When collectors say individual, they mean a meteorite that arrived on Earth as a whole piece of its own. It may have broken from a larger body high in the sky, but it then flew on alone, gained its own fusion crust and landed intact. An individual is different from a fragment broken on impact, or from a slice cut later in a laboratory.
Individuals show all the outside features that tell the story of flight: fusion crust, regmaglypts and sometimes flow lines or an oriented shape. That makes them precious for studying how meteorites behave in the atmosphere. The iron meteorite shower at Sikhote-Alin, Russia, in 1947 produced thousands of beautiful individuals, many covered in thumbprint-like pits. The same fall also produced jagged, twisted "shrapnel" pieces, torn apart in an explosion low in the sky or on impact.
You can recognise an individual because crust covers all or almost all of its surface, with rounded edges and no fresh broken faces. A crusted individual is generally more highly valued than a broken fragment of the same meteorite.
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Level: Explorer Ages 10 and up