Huntite is a carbonate mineral with the chemical formula Mg₃Ca(CO₃)₄. The earliest known reference to huntite is a paper by George Faust from 1953 in which the discovery of a new mineral in Nevada was announced. Faust acknowledges that the mineral probably had been discovered previously but had been misidentified as impure magnesite by W. E. Ford in 1917. Faust announced that the new mineral was to be named huntite in honour of his former teacher, Walter Frederick Hunt (1882-1975), Professor of Petrology at the University of Michigan from 1922 until 1933 and editor of American Mineralogist for 35 years. Faust carried out analysis of the newly discovered mineral, huntite, discovering that it went through two endothermic decompositions which were attributed to the dissociation of MgCO₃ and CaCO₃ respectively. He showed that the chemical formula for huntite was Mg₃Ca(CO₃)₄.