Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Wonderstone

A banded rhyolitic volcanic rock with swirling tan, red, and yellow iron-oxide layers prized as a decorative picture stone.

A translucent to transparent opal in warm yellow, orange, and red tones, prized for body color rather than play-of-color.

A yellow-brown alteration material formed when basaltic volcanic glass reacts with water, common in hydrovolcanic tuffs and pillow lavas.

A translucent yellow-green silicate famous for its botryoidal 'grape' clusters, often hosting needle-like sprays of black epidote.

A vivid yellow-and-black banded stone from Indonesian volcanic vents, colored by sulfur, arsenic minerals and iron oxides, not true jasper.

An opal cut to show chatoyancy, a sharp moving band of light like a cat's eye, usually in honey, green or yellow common opal.

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 translucent chalcedony from Montana filled with black and red dendritic inclusions that look like moss, ferns, or scenic landscapes.

Ancient chemically deposited rock of alternating iron-oxide and silica bands recording Earth's early oxygenation and a major iron ore source.

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