Discovery of Fullerenes and Quasicrystals in Nature

By their very nature, discoveries are often unexpected and thus unpre-dicted. To a considerable extent, discoveries in the geological realm are disconnected from those in the laboratory sciences. In unusual situations, spectacular advances in cognate sciences result in geological or mineralogical discoveries. Such is the case with fullerenes and quasicrystals, whose histories will be briefly explored in the following pages.