Qualla: Bendegó Meteorite

Bendegó Meteorite: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yusuke Kawasaki, CC BY 2.0. On the night of 2 September 2018, fire took the National Museum of Brazil. The building — a former imperial palace at Quinta da Boa Vista in Rio de Janeiro — burned through the night, and the great majority of its collections went with it. When photographers got inside afterward, the image that ran everywhere was of a single dark, pitted mass sitting in the ash beneath a collapsed roof, looking entirely untroubled. That was Bendegó. It had spent thousands of years lying in a Bahian riverbed and 130 years standing in a museum, and it has never once been in a hurry. It weighs 5,360 kilograms and it is essentially solid iron. Fire is not its problem.

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Image: Yusuke Kawasaki | CC BY 2.0

Bendegó Meteorite: A Boy, a Herd, and a Block of Metal

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Felipe Navarete, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1784 a boy named Domingos da Motta Botelho was grazing cattle on a farm near what is now Monte Santo, in the interior of Bahia, when he came across something that did not belong in the caatinga: a slab of metal 2.20 meters long, 1.45 wide and 0.58 thick, sitting half-sunk in t...

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Image: Felipe Navarete | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bendegó Meteorite: The Cart That Got Away

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paulomedford, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1785 the governor, D. Rodrigues Menezes, ordered the meteorite hauled to Salvador. This was ambitious. Five and a third tonnes of iron went onto an ox cart, the ox cart went down a hill, the brakes failed, and the whole arrangement ran away. The meteorite came off and finished...

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Image: Paulomedford | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bendegó Meteorite: Two Hundred and Seventy-Seven Days

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit H. Antunes, Public domain. The second attempt, in 1887, was planned to match the object. A retired officer, José Carlos de Carvalho, led the expedition, with the civil engineers Humberto Saraiva Antunes and Vicente José de Carvalho. Their method was slow and unglamorous and it worked: a heavy wagon dragged...

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Image: H. Antunes | Public domain

Bendegó Meteorite: Iron, Nickel, and a Pattern You Cannot Fake

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:JuGouy, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bendegó is an iron meteorite: core material from a body that formed early in the solar system, melted, separated into metal and rock, and was later broken apart. By mass it is overwhelmingly iron, with about 6.6 percent nickel, 0.47 percent cobalt, 0.22 percent phosphorus, and tr...

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Image: User:JuGouy | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bendegó Meteorite: Still Standing

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 4.0. It has been on public display at the National Museum since 1888, for most of that time the single heaviest object in the building. The 2018 fire destroyed the museum around it and left the meteorite with no major damage, and it was among the first pieces recovered from the ruins ...

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Image: CC BY-SA 4.0