Hexagonal Aperiodic Monotile
In 2009 Joan Taylor (Burnie, Tasmania) found a decoration of the hexagon, which - together with few local matching rules - allows only aperiodic tilings of the plane. This was probably the best example of an aperiodic monotile before the discovery of the Hat tiling. This decorated hexagonal tile, together with the local matching rule, is shown in Fig 1 of a joint paper by J. Socolar and J. Taylor: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.4279v2.