Desert nations, like Libya, Morocco and Oman, have become happy hunting grounds of late in the quest for meteorites. The August Meteoritical Bulletin lists the discovery of 340 meteorites from the African continent and 39 from Oman, a new hotspot in the global search, said Jeffrey Grossman, the journals editor. Another 150 from Oman await classification.

"People have learned that they are valuable and the locals are going out in the desert to find and sell them," Grossman said. "People are coming out of there with bushel baskets of meteorites, literally."

The space rocks stick out like sore thumbs in the stark, sandy landscape of the worlds desert regions. There, the dry climate protects them from excessive weathering.

The new finds are:

• Dhofar 025 and 026: The two moon rocks were found on March 5 and 6, respectively, and are completely different in texture and composition. However, they were found so close to each other in the Dhofar region of Oman that scientists consider it likely they fell to Earth at the same time. Dhofar 025 weighs 1.65 pounds (751 grams) and Dhofar 026 just 0.33 pounds (148 grams). The bulk of each meteorite remains with their anonymous discoverer.
• Northwest Africa 032: This moon rock was found in October 1999 near the border between Morocco and Algeria. The basalt, one of only three such known lunar meteorites, weighs approximately 0.66 pounds (300 grams).
• Sayh al Uhaymir 005 and 008: These Mars rocks -- actually five separate gray-greenish pieces -- were found in Oman on November 26, 1999, just 1.1 miles (1.8 kilometers) apart. All together, Sayh al Uhaymir 005 and 008 weigh a whopping 21.8 pounds (9.9 kilograms).

 (SPACE.com reported on May 22 another martian find from Oman, Dhofar 019, that was officially announced with the meteorites listed above.)

Meteorite hunters scour every continent, including Antarctica, for the rare space rocks, which can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Thanks to American and Soviet missions to the moon, scientists already have hundreds of pounds (kilograms) of lunar rocks to study.

However, the random assortment of lunar rocks that traveled to Earth from the moon -- often after spending millions of years in solar orbit -- may exceed in diversity the targeted samples returned by the Apollo and Luna missions. Those American and Soviet missions all visited a small region of the moon equal to just 8.4 percent of its total surface area.

"We want to know how many different locations on the lunar surface these lunar meteorites represent," said Randy Korotev, a research associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. "Right now its probably more spots than were visited on the Luna and Apollo missions, so its nice to have these random samples."

Among the most famous of all meteorites is a martian example known as ALH 84001, which a team of NASA scientists claimed in 1996 contains traces of ancient life.

That announcement sent the price of Mars rocks soaring, said Ron Baalke, a software engineer at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and a meteorite collector. With the recent discoveries, prices should now begin to drop, he said.

"Its supply and demand and the supply is going up," said Baalke, a portion of whose collection was a big draw at the June 3-4 annual open house at JPL.