Why would the decades-old contents of a cockroach's stomach be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?
What if the cockroach ate historic moon dust?
Our story begins in 1969, when a cockroach expert at the University of Minnesota got involved in an unusual experiment.
NASA had fed cockroaches moon dust gathered by Apollo 11, the first landing of humans on the moon. The space agency wanted Marion Brooks Wallace, a university entomology professor, to see if the beasties came to any harm from disease-causing space microorganisms.
The bugs were just fine (aside from the fact that they had to be killed to be dissected).
Now artifacts from that experiment are being put on the auction block. Here's your chance to own cockroach-digested moon dust.
But you'll have to come up with a good chunk of change. Bidding stood at $30,000 late last week in the online auction at rrauction.com. The winning amount is expected to get a lot higher when the auction concludes in a live bidding session on June 23 in Boston.
RR Auction executive vice president Bobby Livingston said a smaller amount of moon dust than currently for sale recently sold at auction for $400,000.
Livingston said moon material is extremely rare because NASA is famously possessive of objects returned from the Apollo missions. Livingston said in this case, the moon dust was released by the government because it was considered "remnants of destructive testing." In other words, it was destroyed by being eaten by bugs.
"Taken from the bellies of Blatella germanica (German cockroaches), this material has been transformed from moon dust to cockroach chyme (semi-digested food) — a one-of-a-kind rarity in the space marketplace," according to the auction house.
The bug stomach contents have a particular historical significance for Minnesota.
When the cockroaches were taken to Brooks Wallace's lab, it marked the first time material from the moon landed in Minnesota. "First Lunar Soil Was Brought to Cities in Dead Cockroaches," was how the headline in an Oct. 6, 1969, Minneapolis Tribune story put it.
Brooks Wallace died in 2007 at age 89, described in obituaries as a pioneer in her field. Her family sold the moon dust/cockroach artifacts at auction in 2009 for a "low five figures," Livingston said.
The artifacts are currently owned and are being sold by a European collector who wants to remain anonymous, Livingston said.
The materials up for auction include a vial with a 40-milligram pinch of moon dust, three preserved cockroaches and glass slides containing samples from experimental bugs meant to be viewed under a microscope.
"It's not icky. It's historic," Livingston said.
