Kingoodie hammer

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The Kingoodie hammer refers to an object that has the characteristics of a corroded iron nail found in a block of sandstone in 1844 in the Kingoodie Quarry in Kingoodie, Scotland.

Sir David Brewster reported to the British Association that the nail was found when a rough block of stone was being prepared for dressing. The nail was discovered when the overlying clay was cleared from the stone, half an inch (12.5 mm) of the nail projecting into the clay and the remainder of the nail lying along the surface of the stone to within an inch of the head which went down into the stone.^[1] In 1985, Dr. A. W. Medd of the British Geological Survey stated that the sandstone bed from which the object supposedly derives is Lower Old Red Sandstone (Devonian, between 360 and 408 million years old).

Because this would place the artifact hundreds of millions of years before humans evolved on the planet, the object is considered by some to be an Out of Place artifact.

However, there are few references to this object, and the mysteries surrounding its discovery were typical for the nineteenth century. Most such mysteries were resolved by the twentieth.