You won the prize!

The prize is is a bronze medal from the 1888 Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition. The other object shown here is a trade token.

During the gold rush, a shortage of copper coins & pennies and halfpennies made it legal for Victorian shopkeepers to issue their own copper coins, as long as they looked different from official currency.

On the right we have the plant fossil, a fossilised club moss from Victoria. The other specimen is a kind of pseudofossil known as a dendrite – a delicately branching design of mineral deposits that really do look a bit like ferns or feathers.

Mission control, we are good to go – that thing on the right, it’s a Meteorite, all right!

This is a portion of an Iron Octahedrite from the Henbury Meteorite Craters in the Northern Territory. On the left, we have a meteo-rong! We don’t mean to be rude, but this is slag, not a meteorite. It’s molten waste products from an old furnace or fireplace.

One the left are fossilised dinosaur eggs from China, currently on display in Dinosaur Walk at Melbourne Museum. The one on the right might look a lot like an egg, but it’s actually a cannonball concretion, a non-biological geological structure. Layers get added over time, giving it that “shelled” appearance!  

It’s very easy to get the Black Rat (Rattus rattus) and the Bush Rat (Rattus fuscipes) mixed up. Some of the keys to identification include Also, generally speaking, Bush Rats don’t like hanging around where people are!

The meteorite is on the right, specifically it is a Stony-Iron Meteorite from Molong, New South Wales. On the left we have a piece of Ironstone, a Sandstone rich in Iron Oxides. Not everything with iron in it is a meteorite – in fact, most things with iron aren’t meteorites, it’s a very common element in good old Earth rocks.