Posted by tourdemars to Meteorites at March 17, 2002 12:00 PM

All last week, attendees at the 33rd annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, looked forward to one of the meeting's final sessions, whose main attraction was the controversial 4½-billion-year-old Martian meteorite known as ALH 84001. For years David S. McKay (NASA/Johnson Space Center) and his coauthors have maintained that this celebrated stone contains strong evidence — but not proof — of fossilized microbial life.