Legislation to secure the border and enforce immigration laws will come first, Boehner said. As for whether the House could ever agree to provide legal status or a path to citizenship for the 11 million immigrants already in the country illegally, "Well, we're going to find out," Boehner said.

"Through all the conversations that have occurred, with my own members, with Democrat members, it's clear that dealing with this in bite-sized chunks that members can digest and the American people can digest is the smartest way to go," said Boehner, R-Ohio. "And so I'm much more concerned about doing it right than I am in meeting some deadline."

The Ohio Republican spoke at a news conference Thursday, a day after House GOP members met to hash out their way forward on immigration.

They emerged with a consensus on dealing with border security first and moving legislation in pieces, in contrast to the sweeping bill passed last month by the Senate on a bipartisan 68 to 32 vote. What to do about the millions already here illegally remained unanswered.

With Democrats insisting on a path to citizenship, that left it unclear whether Congress will be able to get any kind of immigration bill to President Barack Obama's desk. The issue is one of the president's top second-term priorities.

At the White House Thursday Obama met with two of the lead authors of the Senate bill, Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York and Republican John McCain of Arizona.

Despite the uncertainty, Schumer and McCain both expressed optimism about where things stand in the House.

"The caucus sent out a message yesterday, which was the right message, which is, doing nothing is not an option," Schumer said.

Obama took a largely behind-the-scenes role as the bill moved through the Senate, and McCain suggested it could be a mistake for him to mount a more public campaign in support of immigration reform as the House takes it up.

"We want to be very careful that we have the president's participation but these members, these Republican House members many of them are in districts that they will be representing for a long time do not feel that they have been unduly pressured by the president of the United States," McCain said. "So I think the president is walking a careful line here, and I think it's the appropriate one."

It's not clear whether the House will take any action this month before Congress breaks in early August for its annual month-long summer recess. That would push the issue to the fall, when fiscal and other deadlines loom that could compete with immigration on the legislative calendar. If the issue is delayed until next year, the politics could become even trickier because it's a midterm election year when all House members will face voters.

Rep. Peter King of New York said that if any legislation came to the floor for a vote this month, it would deal only with border security.

Other lawmakers said even that approach raised concerns. Dealing with border security, they said, could lead to negotiations with the Senate that could morph into a compromise granting citizenship for some of the immigrants in the country illegally. They sought and received assurances from Boehner that he wouldn't let that happen, according to Rep. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota.

Boehner also said he won't put any bill on the House floor that doesn't have the support of at least half of the GOP rank and file, a pledge that only increases the challenge for Democrats and others who want to give a chance at citizenship to millions now in the country illegally

In explaining their piecemeal approach, Boehner and fellow GOP leaders said the administration's recent decision to postpone a key element of the health care law shows it can't be trusted to carry through on commitments, such as the one in the Senate immigration bill requiring the borders to be secured before anyone here illegally can get permanent resident status.

Unlike the comprehensive, bipartisan bill that cleared the Senate last month, the House Judiciary Committee has cleared four smaller measures in recent weeks, none of which would include the possibility of citizenship.

One would toughen enforcement of immigration laws and includes a provision that would permit local police officers to enforce such laws as part of an attempt to raise the number of deportations.

Other measures would create a new mandatory system for employees to verify the legal status of their workers, create a new temporary program for farm workers and expand the number of visas for employees in technology industries.

By contrast, the Senate bill would increase border security, provide a pathway to citizenship for many of the estimated 11 million immigrants illegally in the country, expand the highly skilled worker program and set up new guest worker arrangements for lower-skilled workers and farm laborers.

In 1977, he signed his name beside a passage from "Julius Caesar" in an inmate's copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare. The lines are reminiscent of Mandela's electrifying declaration in a 1960s courtroom that he was prepared to die for his beliefs; today they carry added poignancy as the 94-year-old former president lies gravely ill in a hospital.

It is fitting that a leader in one of history's great moral battles would find guidance, across centuries, continents and cultures, from one of history's great dramatists, who explored power, conflict and relationships. Today, the world wonders whether Mandela, hospitalized since June 8 for a lung infection, is near the end of his life, and there is increasing worry about the quality of the life he now endures.

As Mandela lies hampered by protracted illness, the tributes have poured in but squabbling among relatives has stripped some sheen from the family name. It is instructive, then, to see the calm clarity of the play extract selected by the anti-apartheid leader decades ago.

It reads, in part:

"Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come."

Bold or boastful, or both, the play's Julius Caesar was replying to his wife Calpurnia's plea not to go the Senate for fear he would be killed (Brutus was a conspirator in the assassination). The words echo the determination of a younger Mandela to oppose South Africa's racist government at whatever cost, a brave gesture that makes it more difficult for some admirers to see reports about his slow decline in old age.

The "Robben Island Bible," a Shakespeare collection in which Mandela and other anti-apartheid leaders chose passages whose messages held particular meaning for them, inspired Matthew Hahn, a theater director based in London, to write a play about the prisoners' study of the book. Hahn said it is "heartbreaking" to read reports about a dispute among Mandela's progeny as the patriarch languishes.

The family quarrel erupted after it was revealed that a grandson of Mandela had moved the remains of the ex-president's three deceased children to his own village. The bodies were returned to Mandela's hometown under a court order. Legal filings said Mandela's breathing is machine-assisted, though the government has denied that he is in a vegetative state and family and other visitors have said he can open his eyes and recognize people.

"Nobody wants to see their heroes become human," said Hahn, reflecting concern that Mandela is suffering in his hospital bed. "Let the poor man die, let his ideals live."

Mandela's wife, Graca Machel, has said her husband is sometimes uncomfortable but seldom in pain. A grandson, Ndaba Mandela, said Tuesday that his grandfather was "very much alive," the South African Press Association reported.

Even though Mandela retired from public life years ago, the prospect of his death has troubled compatriots who see him as a unifying force in a country struggling with poverty and other problems. South Africa has held peaceful elections since the end of apartheid, but there is a measure of unease about the direction of the nation.

"Mandela is aware of his own symbolic presence, and if we're trying to fit that into a recognizable Shakespearian archetype, it's really the figure of the 'dead king,' and we're left wondering what will follow," said Christopher Thurman, an associate professor in the English literature department of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

That makes Mandela similar to Shakespeare's monarchs in "Richard III" or "Henry V" because of looming questions about what will happen after he dies, according to Thurman. He said the Nobel Peace Prize laureate does not fit the mold of "Julius Caesar," which dwells on the problematic relationship between a populist leader and the masses, or Roman "mob."

While doing research for his play, Hahn interviewed Eddie Daniels, an anti-apartheid activist who was also imprisoned on Robben Island, near Cape Town, and signed the Shakespeare volume beside a soliloquy in the tragedy "Macbeth" about the futility of existence.

In an email to Hahn, Daniels wrote:

"Shakespeare brought home to me the frailty of the human being 'Out, out, brief candle'. No matter how great we are, like Mr. Mandela, or how unknown we are, like me, fate & time will eventually remove us from the stage of life 'That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more'. Our bodies will become dust or ash. Our names and deeds, mine far sooner than Mr. Mandela's, will eventually be erased by the sands of time."

As president, Mandela was also comfortable contemplating his own eventual demise. In 1996, South Africa's Sunday Times newspaper published an essay by Mandela in which he said the country would manage just fine without him.

"Let me restate the obvious: I have long passed my teens; and the distance to my final destination is shorter than the road I have trudged over the years! What nature has decreed should not generate undue insecurity," Mandela said.

"As for the wild rumors about my health, there is little that is new. When we were on Robben Island, enemies of democracy concocted stories that I once had died and, at another time, was 'busy dying,'" he wrote.

Mandela's vision of his exit from the scene sounds like another Shakespeare character.

King Lear said:

"...'tis our fast intent

To shake all cares and business from our age,

Conferring them on younger strengths, while we

Unburden'd crawl toward death."

NASHVILLE, Tennessee (Reuters) - Jan Simek, leader of the team that discovered the oldest known cave art in the United States, says he is far from finished.

The 60-year-old science professor at the University of Tennessee still plans to belly crawl through caves or climb atop bluffs in the hope of finding more art in his cave-rich state.

The Simek team's discovery of 6,000-year-old art in the Cumberland Plateau, a division of the Appalachian Mountains extending from southern West Virginia to northern Alabama, is featured in this month's issue of Antiquity, the archeological journal published by Britain's Durham University.

"Yes, we have cave art that is 6,000 years old," Simek said. "But we don't want to say it is the oldest rock art (in the United States)."

Simek told Reuters there might be ancient rock art in 400 or 500 of the 9,000 caves recorded in the limestone and sandstone bedrock of Tennessee.

His team has explored about 1,000 of them so far. "We are in the early stages of this, to be honest," he said.

Cave locations are kept secret because of concerns that looters could damage any archeological treasures that may be inside.

By global standards, 6,000-year-old cave art is still relatively youthful. Experts say the famous Paleolithic paintings in Lascaux, France, are as old as 20,000 years; other drawings found in Australia and southern Africa are believed to be older still.

Nonetheless, archaeologists and Native Americans are excited about the discoveries by Simek and his team: Alan Cressler of the U.S. Geological Survey; Nicholas P. Hermann of Mississippi State University and Sarah C. Sherwood of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.

Albert Bender, a Cherokee and board adviser for the Nashville-based Native American Indian Association of Tennessee, said the discovery "shows the sophistication of Native American society in the South going back thousands and thousands of years."

Michael Moore, director and state archeologist in Tennessee's Division of Archaeology, described the team's find as "extremely exciting and extremely significant" for "the different insights into prehistoric culture."

RELIGIOUS CONNECTION

Simek said his team's main focus was on the connection of the art to religion. Some of the drawings show humans hunting or engaging in magical activities like flying; others depict more mythological or spiritual images such as serpents and circles.

"We know ... that these folks had recognized multiple layers of reality, and humans only occupied one of the layers in the middle," he said. "But they interacted with and were influenced by a celestial world, an upper world that had certain creatures and spirits associated with it and an underworld that had other spirits associated with it."

Simek said this multi-tiered religious view was represented by the figures on bluffs, those in the open air, and those beneath the ground in the Cumberland Plateau.

He compares the spiritual view of the artists with other religions, including Christianity.

"Christ was taken to the top of the mountain, crucified, taken down, put in a cave and from there was reborn," he said. "Those are the vertical levels of our spiritual world."

To him, the artwork and the sheer physical demands required for the painters and carvers to reach so high on the bluffs as well as so far below ground to depict their spiritual hopes and fears are proof that a sophisticated society predated people who currently call Tennessee home.

"This stuff is thoughtful, insightful, profound, sacred," said Simek, who fortunately is neither claustrophobic nor afraid of the dark. "These people have taught me a great deal about the power of the human mind."

Then he stopped and added: "It's a lot of fun."

(Reporting by Tim Ghianni; Editing by Arlene Getz and Lisa Von Ahn)

"I had been thinking if I was going to do a grand opera, I didn't want it to be "The Summer I Lost My Kitten" blown up with a large orchestra," Adamo said in an interview. "It needed to be a big subject, something that was authentically better in a big theater."

The result, which had its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera on Wednesday night, is "The Gospel of Mary Magdalene," a radical retelling of the biblical story of Jesus. It's about as large-scale as new operas come these days, with a cast of 19 soloists, 48 choristers and an orchestra of 65 musicians.

Adamo, a gay man and son of a divorced mother, was raised as a Catholic but struggled with the church's strict views on sexuality. He said a 2006 article by Joan Acocella in The New Yorker struck a chord with him in tracing how over the centuries the shadowy figure of Mary Magdalene had been turned into a repentant prostitute and then (notably in Dan Brown's best-seller "The Da Vinci Code") re-imagined as Jesus' wife.

"I started to see it as the story of a woman who is overvaluing her sexual relationships and a guy who for his own complicated family history doesn't want to hear anything about sexuality at all," Adamo said. "Neither of these people is unknown to us as moderns."

He sent his idea to David Gockley, head of the San Francisco Opera and the man who while running the Houston Grand Opera had commissioned Adamo's two previous stage pieces, "Little Women," and an adaptation of Aristophanes' "Lysistrata."

"It took some time for me to come on board," Gockley said. "But I eventually came to see it as a wonderful subject for an opera."

He did, however, expect the subject matter would prove controversial and has been surprised at the lack of protest.

"There has been scarcely a ripple from the organized faiths for a piece that debunks the virgin birth, the resurrection, and the celibacy of Jesus," Gockley said. "Just a few people at some of our community outreach events who have stood up and said, 'How dare you!'"

The opera is one of three recent theatrical works to re-examine the role of women in the gospels. John Adams' oratorio, "The Gospel According to the Other Mary," depicts Mary Magdalene in both biblical and modern settings, and Colm Toibin's play "The Testament of Mary," portrays the Virgin Mary as an embittered woman who doubts her son's immortality.

Adamo thinks all these works are part of a healthy reaction against religious orthodoxy that tends to portray women as subservient and carrying the burden of sin for human sexuality.

The composer did a year of research before crafting his own libretto (which is studded with a staggering 116 footnotes that cite biblical and scholarly sources), then spent two years writing the music. He calls the score "probably the least dissonant, most tonal thing I've done."

On opening night, the near-capacity audience gave Adamo a warm, if not ecstatic, ovation. On first hearing, "Gospel" seems hampered by long stretches of theological argument not sufficiently brought to life through the characters or music. Mezzo soprano Sasha Cooke was a radiant and vocally commanding Magdalene, but baritone Nathan Gunn as Jesus (Yeshua in this version) sounded underpowered and seemed dramatically passive.

The first reviews have been mixed to negative. Joshua Kosman in the San Francisco Chronicle said the opera "burns with the fervor of an artist championing a cause," but said "the result is effective only up to a point." Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times was harsher, calling the piece "disappointing" and characterizing the music as "languid and lyrically meandering."

Ahead of the opening, Adamo and Gockley were hopeful that other companies might want to produce "Gospel," though none had made a commitment. The $3.1 million production cost represents a huge investment for a company that like most opera companies has been struggling to balance its budget.

By contrast, Adamo's "Little Women," based on the beloved Louisa May Alcott novel, uses no chorus and calls for an orchestra of just 18 instrumentalists. The fact that it can be performed on a shoestring budget has contributed to its popularity: Since the premiere in 1998, there have been more than 80 productions at regional houses and conservatories.

Still, Adamo is unapologetic about the size of his new work.

"Why can't an opera be both grand and new?" he said. "Why not write a piece that a big house can do better than a smaller one? Those houses need new work too, or else they'll turn into museums or skating rinks."

"Gospel" continues in repertory through July 7, along with Mozart's "Cosi fan tutte" and Offenbach's "The Tales of Hoffmann."

Still, the Benjamin Britten opera, commissioned to help mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, was hardly a rousing success back in 1953.

Instead of the joyous celebration many expected, Britten and librettist William Plomer produced a somber work about the first Queen Elizabeth and her relationship with the Earl of Essex. Though the opera has festive elements, it ends on a downbeat note, with the monarch portrayed as an aging, disillusioned woman contemplating death.

The first night audience at Covent Garden which included many members of the royal family greeted it with bewilderment, some wags dubbed it "Boriana," and the piece soon disappeared from the Royal Opera's repertory.

Until now.

This month, "Gloriana" is back in a new production by Richard Jones that the company's director, Kasper Holten, notes commemorates a "triple anniversary": 60 years since the coronation and the opera's premiere and 100 years since the composer's birth.

"There was feeling that it deserved another chance, to be looked at again," said Holten, who holds the same job Lord Harewood did in 1953. "To see whether the piece isn't really better than its reputation."

That it is. "Gloriana" contains some of Britten's finest music, though it possibly falls short of being a masterpiece to rank with his "Peter Grimes" or "Billy Budd."

"There are fantastic moments," Holten said in an interview. "The courtly dances, the lute song. I think the problem is that there are other parts that dramatically fail to pick up the same pace. That makes for an uneven evening."

What may have seemed an inappropriately dark portrayal of monarchy 60 years ago also feels different with the passage of time a perspective heightened by Jones's production. He frames the work as a pageant being staged for the young queen by a local community group of amateurs. This mixture of Tudor pomp with nostalgia for a Britain that was still recovering from World War II makes for a poignant combination.

"On opening night I had a strong feeling that from the first moment, people got it," Holten said. "This piece is a part of their history and it says something about them."

Critical reaction has been mixed. Many applauded Jones's staging while finding fault with the piece itself. Writing in the Financial Times, Richard Fairman said it was "brave of the Royal Opera to bring the work back to the theatre where it had its troubled birth," but he added that "drama and music are stretched painfully thin. Perhaps that first-night audience was not so wrong-headed after all."

More positive was Michael Church in The Independent, who noted that in 1953 "people just weren't ready for a work which chimes so neatly with our post-modern consciousness. . Covent Garden," he said, "has now shown that 'Gloriana' is, if not a great work, certainly one of the most intriguing in the canon."

Part of what's intriguing is the way Britten and Plomer depict the title character. Basing his libretto on Lytton Strachey's psychological history, "Elizabeth and Essex," Plomer presents a queen who, as Holten says, "is quite a flawed character, struggling with the dilemma between personal and public roles."

The idea of the queen as outsider in her own court, beloved by her people but lonely nonetheless, struck a chord with Britten, who was drawn to portrayals of outcasts in many of his other works as well.

In the opera's final scene, after Elizabeth has condemned Essex to death for treason, she is left alone on stage. Britten daringly subverts expectations here: Instead of giving her a final aria with a soaring vocal line, he has her abandon singing altogether for stretches of spoken declamation.

"It's almost as if the musical language falls apart at the end, as if she loses her language," Holten said. "There's no more singing in her, she's been worn out. I think that's a beautiful effect."

"Gloriana," starring soprano Susan Bullock in the title role and tenor Toby Spence as Essex, runs through July 6.

Uruzgan provincial government spokesman Abdullah Himmat says authorities are trying to determine how the suicide bomber passed three checkpoints to enter the crowded hall Friday at about 12:30 p.m.

He says the bomber entered the dining hall and detonated a suicide vest just inside the door. The dining hall was on a base used by police assigned to secure the main highway to neighboring Kandahar.

Afghan media reported 10 of the 12 victims were Afghan national police officers. Himmat however would only say that the dead were "primarily police." Five other people were wounded in the explosion.

(Reuters) - International Boxing Federation (AIBA) President C.K. Wu has decided to run for the post of the president of the International Olympic Committee as the race for one of the world's top sports jobs heats up, a source said.

"Dr Wu handed over a letter this morning to Dr (Jacques) Rogge, informing him about his candidacy. He will announce it officially next Thursday," a source told Reuters.

The Taiwanese is the third IOC member, behind Germany's Thomas Bach and Singaporean Ng Ser Miang, both IOC vice presidents, to decide to run for the post with the election set for September 10 at the IOC session in Buenos Aires.

Rogge, who succeeded Juan Antonio Samaranch in 2001, sees his two-term presidency come to a mandatory end in September.

There are several more potential candidates with Puerto Rican Richard Carrion, head of the finance commission, Swiss sports administrator Denis Oswald and former Olympic pole vault champion Sergei Bubka, seen as possible contenders. The deadline for candidacies is June 10.

Wu took over troubled AIBA in 2006, managing to restore its Olympic credibility after a string of changes to rules and judging following controversies at the Athens 2004 Olympics that led to an IOC ban on funds for the federation.

The England-educated 66-year-old architect, who is a member of the powerful IOC Executive Board since last year and has been an IOC member for 25 years, was urged earlier this week by his own federation to make a bid for the presidency.

He oversaw a hugely successful boxing tournament at the London 2012 Games where women boxers made a glittering Olympic debut.

He was also in charge of designing the Samaranch Memorial in Tianjin, China, which houses the late IOC president's private collections, and was officially inaugurated by Rogge late last month.

(Reporting by Karolos Grohmann; Editing by Alison Wildey)

Nina Agdal agreed to step in as Jake Davidson's date Thursday night after he got turned down for prom by supermodel Kate Upton.

The Sherman Oaks teen appeared in a YouTube video that was viewed more than 2.5 million times asking Upton to be his date.

After Upton declined because of a scheduling conflict, Agdal volunteered to go, saying she never got to attend her own prom.

The Danish model is better known as the bikini-clad sunbather in a Carl's Jr. ad.

Davidson told the Los Angeles Daily News (http://bit.ly/173eVPS) he had an incredible night and said Agdal was down to earth.

Regulator Ofgem said at least 200 million pounds of electricity is stolen in Britain each year. As much as a third of that is used to feed illegal cannabis farms, it said.

New proposals, due to be in operation by 2015, will require suppliers to detect, investigate and prevent electricity theft, liaising with police forces and government. Similar rules were introduced for gas theft earlier this year.

Indoor cannabis farms, which use artificial light to mimic the effect of the sun, use around 40 times more electricity than normal households, Ofgem said.

The six big energy suppliers that control the bulk of the retail market in Britain are EDF Energy, Centrica, SSE, RWE's npower, E.ON and Iberdrola's Scottish Power.

Angela Knight, head of Energy UK, the trade association for the electricity and gas companies, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that Ofgem was right to highlight the issue and that industry was keen to "step up to the plate." But she expressed some reservations about its announcement of threatened fines.

"It's a bit of a pity they've done it that way, but working with Ofgem to get this right, we're absolutely up for that.

"This is complicated, (the cannabis growers) are bypassing the system, so the normal meter reading, you don't pick it up." She said the industry would need significant help from the police as those involved tended to be fraudsters and gangs.

Cannabis is a 'class B' drug in Britain, which means those who supply and produce it can be imprisoned for up to 14 years and/or face an unlimited fine.

(Reporting by Rosalba O'Brien. Editing by Jane Merriman)

In April, Alexander was contacted by farmers Bruce and Nelva Lilienthal, who sent the professor photos of a peculiar stone they'd found a couple years ago while clearing their corn field in Arlington, Minn.

The rock, which is about 16 inches by 12 inches (40.6 centimeters by 30.5 cm) across, and about 2 inches (5 cm) thick, weighs a surprising 33 pounds (15 kg) about three times more than a regular Earth rock of that size. Its weight, as well as its unusual flattened shape and rusty surface, immediately suggested it was special. "I said, 'That certainly looks like a meteorite, but I need to see it up close to tell for sure,'" Alexander recalled. []

On May 30, the couple brought their find to Alexander's lab and allowed him to chip 0.02 ounces (0.6 grams) off the edge of it for analysis under a scanning electron microscope. The rock was iron, and contained about 8 percent nickel a telltale giveaway. Iron objects on Earth contain almost no nickel, but iron rocks from space are usually between 5 and 20 percent nickel. The microscope also revealed what's called a Widmansttten pattern of nickel-iron crystals that's .

To say that the revelation was welcome news would be a major understatement.

"I am about to retire at the end of next year, and this was thethat's been brought in," Alexander told SPACE.com. "Yes, ma'am, I was excited. I am still excited."

Though they haven't spent decades waiting for something like this, the Lilienthals are coming to appreciate their find just as much.

"It's not something we were expecting to find, but now that we've found out what it is, it's been exciting to learn about it," said Nelva Lilienthal.

Her husband Bruce had come upon the rock two years ago during the annual spring field clearing, when the farmers comb over their land to pick up the many rocks that have been turned up from the frost over the winter.

"You pick up hundreds and hundreds of rocks," Bruce Lilienthal said. "You pick 'em up and you get your fields planted. When we found it, we thought it was kind of different and we put it aside."

The couple noticed the rock's unsettling weight and rare appearance, but didn't think too much of it at the time, and added it to their pile of interesting finds.

"At that point it was time to plant our fields again and we put it off until a rainy day," Nelva said.

Recently, they revisited the issue, and their son, who works for the University of Minnesota, made some inquiries at the school and was referred to Alexander.

Since the discovery of the rock's true nature, the object has taken on more importance.

"It's probably not the prettiest rock that we've got in the pile it looks kind of like a burnt pizza but I'm really liking it more," Nelva told SPACE.com. "With all this publicity, it's becoming a favorite."

The future for the space rock is unclear right now. Because it fell on the Lilienthals' property, it legally belongs to them. They may decide to hold onto their , or they may not.

"It's a novelty right now," Bruce said. "The university wants to do more tests on it, so we'll let them do more tests and then we'll decide if we want to sell it or keep it."

Alexander would love to be able to study the rock in detail. He's reasonably sure that the object is another piece of a meteorite that was found in a nearby field in Arlington in 1894 the two rocks have similar shapes and nickel content. But to tell for sure, a larger chunk of the object would have to be cut off and examined.

The meteorite offers some tantalizing scientific possibilities, Alexander said. For one thing, he'd like to compare the weathering and rusting on the surface of this rock to the 1984 meteorite, which was buried for about 100 years less time before being found.

The meteorite also appears to belong to a rare class of non-magnetic meteorites that originated in melt pools on asteroids created by impacts of other rocks. Additionally, its flattened shape is rare, as most meteorites are roughly spherical.

"Both of those factors mean that it's potentially very scientifically interesting," Alexander said.

The Lilienthals, meanwhile, have a newfound interest in the rocks that turn up in their fields. If their meteorite is related to the 1894 find, it stands to reason there could be more fragments of the sameout there.

"It's very possible there's some in there still underground, still in the field," Bruce Lilienthal said. At the very least, it's made their annual rock-picking-up duty a little bit more exciting, he said.

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