Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

Search and identify 1,000+ rocks, minerals, crystals, and gemstones — with properties, formation, colors, hardness, and how to tell them apart.

Thulite

A pink, manganese-rich variety of zoisite used as an ornamental gemstone, often mottled with white quartz and grey matrix.

Rutile is a major titanium ore and the famous golden needle inclusion that gives rutilated quartz its shimmering threads.

A jasper made of angular fragments naturally cemented back together, typically showing red and brown pieces in a quartz matrix.

A vivid blue-green hydrated copper silicate, soft on its own but prized as a gem when hardened by intergrown quartz or chalcedony.

An evaporite rock of the mineral halite (sodium chloride), the source of common salt, with a distinctive salty taste.

A rare chlorine-bearing iron garnet-supergroup mineral, the ferric analogue of wadalite, formed in high-temperature combustion-metamorphic rocks.

The natural mineral form of table salt, a soft, water-soluble evaporite that forms perfect cubic crystals and tastes salty.

Opal without play-of-color, valued for solid body hues; also called potch, it occurs in a wide range of colors worldwide.

A royal-blue feldspathoid mineral with white calcite veining, often confused with lapis lazuli but lacking its golden pyrite flecks.

A banded, metamorphosed iron formation in which bright red jasper alternates with silvery hematite or magnetite layers.