A NEW MINERAL SPECIES ISOSTRUCTURAL WITH VESUVIANITE, FROM THE SAKHA REPUBLIC, RUSSIAN FEDERATION: REPLY

requirements for defining and naming a new mineral species. These requirements are set out in detail by the Commission on New Minerals and Mineral Names of the International Mineralogical Association, and were adhered to exactly by Groat et al. (1998) in their de-scription of the new mineral species wiluite. In a paper intended only to report the accreditation and name of a new mineral species, an extensive treatment of all as-pects of that mineral is inappropriate, particularly when the mineral is one with a long history and a considerable volume of previous published work. Following the same logic, we find the comments of Galuskin & Galuskina (2000) irrelevant and inappropriate. Indeed, use of the phrase “a boron-bearing variety of vesuvianite ” prompts the question as to whether the paper of Groat et al. (1998) was even understood by Galuskin & Galuskina (2000). Groat et al. (1998) showed that wiluite is NOT just a variety of vesuvianite but a distinct species that deserves the status of a mineral isostructural with vesuvianite. Although there has been much work on wiluite from the Wilui River area, Sakha Republic, Russian Federa-tion over the past 200 years, it was not until the crystallographic work of Groat et al. (1994) that the details of the mechanism of incorporation of B into the vesuvianite structure were elucidated. They showed that B occupies two new sites in the vesuvianite structure. Where these sites are more than half-occupied, a ne