 Detection of samarium and related elements was announced by several scientists in the second half of the 19th century; however, most sources give the priority to the French chemist Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran. Boisbaudran isolated samarium oxide and / or hydroxide in Paris in 1879 from the mineral samarskite (( Y, Ce, U, Fe) 3 (Nb, Ta, Ti) 5O16 ) and identified a new element in it via sharp optical absorption lines. The Swiss chemist Marc Delafontaine announced a new element decipium (from Latin: decipiens meaning "deceptive, misleading") in 1878, but later in 1880 – 1881 demonstrated that it was a mixture of several elements, one being identical to the Boisbaudran's samarium. Although samarskite was first found in the remote Russian region of Urals, by the late 1870s its deposits had been located in other places making the mineral available to many researchers. In particular, it was found that the samarium isolated by Boisbaudran was also impure and contained comparable amount of europium. The pure element was produced only in 1901 by Eugène-Anatole Demarçay.
