Photo: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

Here at the Discovery Centre, we receive all sorts of finds from all sorts of people. A 9 year old beachcomber finds a "shark tooth" which turns out to be millions of years old, for example. Today, an enquirer came in with this fine specimen he found with his metal detector, in suburban Melbourne. It certainly is heavy, with a metallic cast. It warms to the touch and has an intriguing scalloped surface. Of course, our visitor would like to know if his find is of extra- or terrestrial origin! 

Photo: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

Looking at it through the eye of one of our Discovery Centre magnifying lenses yields little more information, so off to the Senior Collection Manager of Mineralogy it goes!

With a mounting collection of rocks and minerals on the Discovery Centre enquiry shelves awaiting identification, Museum Victoria geologists Bill (below left) and Dermot (below right) paid us a visit to impart some of their rock-solid (hilarious pun by me) wisdom...

Photo: Meg Lomax  Source: Museum Victoria

Now, change of scene for a moment - earlier in the week, one of the Discovery Centre volunteers was kind enough to bring in some tasty snacks for us, including cheese and biscuits, dried apricots, almonds, and also some special chocolates... these chocolates were covered in a sugar coating and shaped and coloured to resemble pebbles. Novel and tasty.

Photo: Meg Lomax  Source: Museum Victoria

Being the wacky funsters that we are, we thought we'd offer up a couple of these rock-chocolates to Bill and Dermot for "identification".

After weighing, and inspecting, and consulting with each other, and mumbling something about garden variety river pebbles, Jo took the identification process into her own hands and bit the "rock" in half.

After a lot of "ha ha's" and "very funny's", the parting message from our expert geologists was "don't tell my colleagues about this!"

So I decided to post it on the web...

Photo: Meg Lomax  Source: Museum Victoria