Our e-Rocks database is continuously growing and flexing as our sellers add new mineral types, varieties and of course the odd thing that we think is relevant to the naming of items on the site.
Recently I was adding a group of related "new" minerals, péligotite, ottohahnite and klaprothite.
Officially IMA approved pending publication these minerals are found together, first identified in 2015 as fluorescent uranyl sulphate minerals from Blue Lizard Mine, Red Canyon, San Juan County, Utah, USA.
As we have only seen a few of these specimens listed I was surprised to see a list of other items appear as klaprothite from Wittichen in Germany.
These specimens are of a metallic dark grey composition and not the yellow green expected.
Simply explained, corrected and the "Klap Trap" closed. Here is a quote from Mindat
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"There have been four attempts at naming a mineral for Martin Heinrich Klaproth [1743-1817], chemist and discoverer of uranium, zirconium, and cerium.
Francis S. Beudant coined klaprothite in 1824 and renamed the mineral klaprothine in 1832. Both of these names were soon shown to refer to lazulite.
Klaprothite was used by Thomas Petersen in 1868. In 1873, George Brush rejected the re-use of this mineral name by Petersen and called it klaprotholite.
In 1947, this mineral was identified using non-type specimens to be a mixture of wittichenite and emplectite by Edward Nuffield. G. Springer.
Furthermore S. Demirsoy studied non-type material and suggested that klaprothite was a polymorph of emplectite, possibly cuprobismuthite."
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With the new discovery I can count three "Klaprothites"
Klaprothite (of Beudant) - lazulite
Klaprothite (of Petersen) - mixture of emplectite and wittichenite
Klaprothite - IMA2015-087
Now added to the database and minerals correctly assigned!
