In 1960 the well known and highly skilled collector of Iveland minerals Mr. Olaf Landsverk asked the senior author to examine a reddish brown mineral from Kåbuland, which he himself had not been able to identify.

An X-ray powder diagram gave a cubic pattern of the fluorite type with a spacing slightly different from that of fluorite. A spectrogram showed only rare earths, among which cerium dominated, as main components. There was thus not much doubt left that the mineral was cerianite, until then known from two localities only, one in North America and the other in South America.

In 1961 one of the authors (H. N.) in the company of Messrs. Olaf Landsverk and Orest Landsverk found the same mineral in another cleavelandite pegmatite dyke in Iveland on the farm Birkeland (Birkeland No. 3, Tunnelen. See H. Bjørlykke (1935)). A search for it in all the other known Iveland dykes of the cleavelandite type was unsuccessful.