 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 ) <unk> ) and identified a new element in it via sharp optical absorption lines . The Swiss chemist Marc <unk> announced a new element <unk> ( 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 <unk> . 
