structural:scholar_edition
Further classification

It was only with the discovery of the first transuranic elements, which from plutonium onward have dominant +3 and +4 oxidation states like the lanthanides, that it was realised that the actinides were indeed filling f-orbitals rather than d-orbitals, with the transition-metal-like chemistry of the early actinides being the exception and not the rule. In 1945, when American physicist Glenn T. Seaborg and his team had discovered the transuranic elements americium and curium, he proposed the actinide concept, realising that thorium was the second member of an f-block actinide series analogous to the lanthanides, instead of being the heavier congener of hafnium in a fourth d-block row.