Biographical Archive

Oscar E. Monnig
1902-1999
Forth Worth, Texas, USA

Oscar E. Monnig, who began collecting meteorites in the early 1930s, amassed one of the most significant private meteorite collections of his day [Ehlmann & McCoy].

The Monnig Collection is housed at the Texas Christian University (TCU), located in Forth Worth, city where Oscar Monnig spent all of his life. The collection was given to TCU over a period of ten years, from 1977 to 1987. The cataloguing and labelling was done by Glenn Huss and his wife Margaret, of the American Meteorite Laboratory [Elhmann, 1996].

Most specimens from the Monnig Collection can be identified by a collection inventory number, which is directly painted on the specimen, in white. The Monnig and Huss numbering follow the same strategy, which is the letter M for Monnig (H for Huss) followed by two numbers separated by a dot, the first number being the location index and the second one the specimen number. The correspondance between Monnig numbers and meteorite locations is given in 2 catalogues [Ehlmann, 1996; 2008]. A very few older specimens carry another set of numbers, usually consisting of four large upper case characters. Those codes were painted by Monnig himself and referred to ranchers' names from whom he acquired the meteorites [Ehlmann, 2008]. Meteorite specimens from the Monnig Collection deaccessioned from TCU come with a TCU label.

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