After the first successful synthesis of meitnerium in 1982 by the GSI team, a team at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, also tried to observe the new element by bombarding bismuth-209 with iron-58. In 1985 they managed to identity alpha decays from the descendant isotope 246Cf indicating the formation of meitnerium. The observation of a further two atoms of 266Mt from the same reaction was reported in 1988 and of another 12 in 1997 by the German team at GSI.