* Astronomy

As a way of meeting your maker, this one at least had the benefit of originality. On October 15 1972, a farmer in Trujillo, Venezuela, heard a sonic boom in the sky. The next day he discovered a cow lying dead in the field, its neck and shoulder pulverised. The bemused farmer found a boulder lying nearby, which he took away to use as a doorstep.
It was only many years later that a group of scientists, hearing what had happened, descended on Trujillo and confirmed that the boulder was in fact natural material from outer space that had hurtled through the Earth's atmosphere and crashed to the ground.
In the process, it bequeathed to the hapless cow a form of posthumous distinction as the only living thing that has been documented to have been killed by a meteorite.

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Credit Darryl Pitt