THE KROTITE.

The Krotite meteorite was discovered in Morocco in 1934, lending it the official name of “NWA 1934.” The small rock had few distinguishing features, but there was one problem: Nobody could figure out what it was made of. It wasn’t until 2010 that researchers came to the conclusion that the meteorite contained a completely new mineral that had never been seen before.

The mineral was named “krotite” after Alexander N. Krot, a researcher in cosmochemistry at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, Hawaii, the cosmochemist who worked on figuring out the chemical composition of the rock. Interestingly enough, krotite is extremely similar to a few different forms of man-made concrete, just further proof that anything we can make, nature’s probably already figured out. And in this case, nature figured it out about 4.6 billion years ago—krotite is believed to be one of the oldest, having formed back when the Solar System was still just thinking about coming together.