It is relatively infrequent these days for a novel mineral to be discovered in the natural environment (in this context, this implies on the Earth). On the rare events of such a discovery, the new mineral is typically found in milligram quantities. In an article by Ronald Peterson, William Nelson, Bruce Madu, and Herbert Shervell, they describe the discovery of kilograms of a mineral that had only been synthesized previously, but never before detected in the natural environment. As if that were not impressive enough, they went looking for this mineral because they thought it had been observed on Mars!