Year of Discovery

Dear Admins,
should "Year of Discovery" be "Year of Publication" or "Year of IMA-Approvement"?
As for instance I found Cetineite on 29th of May 1986.
Greetings
Milo

Year of discovery is year of discovery. Year of publication is year of publication. etc. etc.

But not always we able to know date of real discovery. So very often YD=YP~YA. For example fluornatromicrolite wasn't published up to now, but was approved ~10 years ago.

For example I'd collect first specimens of ferriallanite-(Ce) in July of 1990, had calculate on paper, that these specimens should to contain Al-deficient allanite in winter of 1992, but approved and described this mineral was only in 2002. By the way, the first published analyz of such mineral was known from end of XIX century.

Similar delay with formal discovery had occur and with Paravinogradovite. We were must waiting for its structure determination, but it was very difficult to found good enough monocrystal for this.

I have at least 25-30 new phases in my collection (some of them more than 10-15 years) and waiting when somebody will discover/describe them. The last mineral from this group, described in 2008, was Burovaite. Other examples were Perlialite, Bykovaite, Shkatulkaite, Rheniite, Uramarsite, Seidite-(Ce), Kuzmenkoite-Mn, Litvinskite, Normandite, Chukhrovite-(Nd), etc., etc., etc.

The "Year of discovery" is there to be used if the actual year of discovery of the mineral is mentioned in the descriptive paper. Unfortunately, it's often used for the year of publication.

Cetineite is IMA 1986-019 (June 1986). The proposal was registered by IMA Commission on New Minerals at the date of 10.12.1987.
So the discovery can not be May 1986, 29.

Anyway see the informartion done by Jim.

Marco,
even if I found Cetineite a few days earlier than the official date, year of discovery is 1986 not 1987.

But now I understand the difficulty to name it year of ...
Thanks all for your answers.
Milo

Not Emil. Cetineite has the IMA number of the proposal 1986-019. It was found for the first time by Italian collectors in 1985.
The type description is: Sabelli, C. & Vezzalini, G. (1987): Cetineite, a new antimony oxide-sulfide from Cetine mine, Tuscany, Italy. Neues Jahrbuch für Mineralogie Monatshefte,1987, 419-425.

Marco,
then year of discovery in the mindat Cetineite-description has to be 1985 not 1987.
But as I met Giancarlo Brizzi at octobre 1987 he said it has been found mai-june 1986.

Dear Emil,
I have the correct information about the first finds of cetineite: at the Cremona Show of september 1985 Tuscan collectors presented the first specimens of cetineite (at that time the phase was an unknown).
The data is confirmed by the entry of the proposal by IMA CNMNC (June 1986). The study started at the first days of 1986 and finished at June 1986 with the presentation of the proposal.
Ciao.

Has this issue been clarified? I guess I'm still a little lost on the year of discovery definition.

For example, Tancoite. The year approved is 1979, discovery 1980. How can a species be approved before it's discovered?