When nomadic prospectors stumbled across a curious rose-tinted rock scattered across Mali’s desolate salt plains in 2022, they had no idea they were holding a lost piece of planetary history.

It was nearly ignored. Researchers initially suspected the 800-gram (2-pound) specimen was just another common shergottite — a familiar class among the roughly 435 Martian rocks that have crashed into Earth. And now, it turns out the experts were initially wrong. 

In a new study, NASA-funded researchers revealed that the meteorite, dubbed Teghaza 001, is actually a 4.1-billion-year-old fragment of the primordial Martian crust. The discovery makes it one of the absolute oldest rocks from the Red Planet ever identified, offering humanity a rare glance back to a time when Mars looked like Earth.

Mineral and isotopic analyses reveal that subsurface water altered the rock around 4.1 billion years ago, pointing to a far more dynamic early Martian water cycle than previously understood.

What makes the meteorite remarkable is not just its age, but what happened to it.

Teghaza 001 sets itself apart from rare peers like ALH84001 and “Black Beauty” through its complex, multi-mineral volcanic structure rather than a single mineral or fragmented composition.

“It was only after we started looking closely that we realized this meteorite is really unique. One of the paper’s reviewers called it a Rosetta Stone for Mars,” said Yang Liu of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

Unlocking the rock’s secrets required precision techniques that seem pulled from science fiction.

To date the sample without destroying it, Caltech geochemist Francois Tissot applied a precise rubidium-strontium method directly to the rock’s surface.

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