In 1977, the famous Croatian mineralogist Branimir Darko Sturman and his Canadian colleague Joseph A. Mandarino, experts from the Department of Mineralogy and Geology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, discovered a new mineral, maricite. The scientific paper describing maricite for the first time was published in The Canadian Mineralogist, and it was confirmed as a new mineral by the International Mineralogical Association (IMA) under the designation IMA1976-024.

Maricite was discovered in an iron-siderite deposit in the Big Fish River area on the eastern border of Yukon, Canada. The type locality of maricite is about 15 km east of the baricite locality and some other phosphate minerals. Nods of maricite are found in shale, part of a mineral paragenesis that includes quartz, ludlamite, vivianite, pyrite, and wolframite.

The simplified chemical formula of maricite is NaFePO₄. It crystallizes in the orthorhombic system but does not appear in crystal form; instead, it occurs as nodules of various sizes. The nodules are composed of grains, elongated along the crystallographic axis "a," forming a radial or subparallel structure. Maricite is colorless to gray, sometimes dark brown. Its streak is white. Maricite has a vitreous luster, is transparent to translucent, and lacks pronounced cleavage. The relative hardness of maricite is 4 - 4.5, and its density is 3,66 g/cm³.