DISCOVERY OF THE OUFRANE, ALGERIA, STONY METEORITE

Name: OUFRANE

Place of find: 20 m west and 120 m southwest from an empty 2001 petrol barrel, marked "Adrar 55 - Tiberrhamine 56," on the old main Timimoun-Adrar track called "Piste des Bidons" (Track of Barrels), 31 km south-southwest (300^°) from the village of Oufrane, 57 km north-northeast (32^°) from the city of Adrar (Touat Valley), Western Tademait Plateau, Algerian Sahara, Algeria.

28^° 17'45"N, 0^° 01'30"E.

Date of find: February 4, 1969, may have been a recent fall, see below.

Class and type: Stony. Veined olivine-hypersthene chondrite.

Number of individual specimens: 2

Total weight: 540 g (335 g and 205 g)

Circumstances of find: Two stones were found on February 4, 1969 by J. Ph. Lefranc, geologist at the Centre de Recherches sur les Zones Arides, C.N.R.S., Paris, collaborator with the Algerian Geological Survey. They were found 95 m apart on Quaternary sandy gravel overlying the Cretaceous Plateau. The large stone was intact, the small one had a broken surface. Peculiarly well preserved, the two stones had sharp points thrust into the sandy gravel that had been recently compacted by rain. They were marked by a few drops of rain on the top. The last rain before the discovery of the stones had been on the night of January 9 or 10, 1969. It can be presumed that the stones fell about the end of the rainfall on the morning of January 10, 1969.

Source: Paul Pellas, Laboratoire de Mineralogie, Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris.