Over the last few decades, the advent of new and/or improved observation tools revealed the remarkable complexity of the formation process of minerals from aqueous solutions. The dominance of the original 'textbook' picture of these phenomena, derived from the adaptation of classical nucleation and growth theories (CNT), has faded, and classical one step formation pathways are complemented by more complex multistep, so-called "non-classical" nucleation and crystallisation pathways. These pathways comprise a variety of precursor and intermediate species, including solute colloidal entities (e.g. prenucleation clusters (PNCs)), liquid(-like) phases, amorphous and nanocrystalline solids, or mesocrystals leading to the formation of the final crystals through multistep and self-assembly mechanisms . Most of our knowledge and intuition about non-classical crystallisation come from the studies on mineral systems of metal carbonates , phosphates , sulfates or iron oxides . In these systems, the precursor species persist long enough (typically for at least several seconds to hours) to be observed and, thus, further investigated.