Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Morganite Crystal

The natural crystal form of morganite, the manganese-colored pink-to-peach variety of beryl popular in romantic jewelry.

Natural emerald crystals still embedded in their host rock, prized as mineral specimens that show how the gem grew in place.

A delicate pinkish-purple to peach garnet from Tanzania, a pyrope-spessartine blend named for the soft colors of a lotus flower.

A trade name for raspberry-pink beryl-family gems, most often the cesium-rich mineral pezzottaite from Madagascar.

The smoky brown to gray variety of quartz, colored by natural irradiation, valued as both a gemstone and crystal specimen.

A trade name occasionally used for golden-yellow beryl (golden beryl or heliodor), the iron-colored yellow variety of the emerald mineral.

A tough, fine-grained, non-foliated rock formed by the intense heat of nearby magma baking surrounding rock at contact zones.

The fine-grained volcanic equivalent of monzonite, an intermediate lava with nearly equal feldspars and little free quartz.

A zirconium-rich garnet related to kimzeyite, formed in carbonatites and skarns, named after the Kerimasi volcano in Tanzania.

A hydrogrossular garnet first described from Crestmore, California, now regarded as equivalent to hibschite in the hydrogarnet series.

Natural volcanic glass speckled with embedded mineral crystals (phenocrysts) such as feldspar or cristobalite that grew before the lava chilled.