Adamantium is a fictional metal alloy, most famously appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. It is best known as the substance bonded to the character Wolverine's skeleton and claws. Adamantium was first mentioned in the Marvel Universe by writer Roy Thomas and artists Barry Windsor-Smith and Syd Shores in Marvel Comics' The Avengers #66 (July 1969), which presents the substance as part of the character Ultron's outer shell. In the stories where it appears, the defining quality of adamantium is its practical indestructibility. Etymology The word is a pseudo-Latin neologism (real Latin: adamans, from original Greek ἀδάμας [=indomitable]; adamantem [Latin accusative]) based on the English noun and adjective adamant (and the derived adjective adamantine) added to the neo-Latin suffix "-ium." The adjective adamant has long been used to refer to the property of impregnable, diamond-like hardness, or to describe a very firm/resolute position (e.g. He adamantly refused to leave). The noun adamant describes any impenetrably or unyieldingly hard substance and, formerly, a legendary stone/rock or mineral of impenetrable hardness and with many other properties, often identified with diamond or lodestone. Adamant and the literary form adamantine occur in works such as The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, Gulliver's Travels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Lord of the Rings, and the film Forbidden Planet (as "adamantine steel"). In 1912, The Metallurgo Syndicate, Ltd., of Balfour House, used "Adamantium" (with a capital 'A') as a product brand when they exhibited "two of their specialities in the shape of Adamantium bronze—a high-class non-corrosive, anti-friction metal..." The term adamantium occurs in the 1941 short story "Devil's Powder" by Malcolm Jameson:"It was a bullet. It was a small slug of adamantium, the toughest and hardest of all metals..."All these uses predate the use of adamantium in Marvel's comics. History and properties According to the comic books, the components of the alloy are kept in separate batches—typically in blocks of resin—before molding. Adamantium is prepared by melting the blocks together, mixing the components while the resin evaporates. The alloy must then be cast within eight minutes. Marvel Comics' adamantium has an extremely stable molecular structure that prevents it from being further molded even if the temperature is high enough to keep it in its liquefied form. In its solid form, it is described as a dark, shiny gray, like high-grade steel or titanium. It is almost impossible to destroy or fracture in this