Rock Identifier

Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Midnight Lace Obsidian

A black volcanic glass threaded with delicate grey, swirling lace-like bands of flow lines that show beautifully when polished.

igneous
Tourmaline

Tourmaline

A boron-rich silicate gemstone group famous for occurring in every color of the rainbow, sometimes several within a single crystal.

gemstone
Imperial Garnet

Imperial Garnet

A trade name for high-brilliance golden grossular-andradite (grandite) garnet, most associated with the Mali deposits of West Africa.

gemstone
Scenic Jasper

Scenic Jasper

A patterned jasper whose bands and inclusions create miniature landscapes of deserts, mountains, and skies within the stone.

mineral
Cleavelandite

Cleavelandite

A striking platy, blade-like variety of albite feldspar that grows in fanned aggregates of thin white crystals within granite pegmatites.

mineral

Peanut Wood Jasper

A fossilized, silicified wood from Australia with white peanut-shaped spots, formed where ancient driftwood was bored by clams and filled with pale sediment.

gemstone
Lapis Lazuli

Lapis Lazuli

An intensely blue metamorphic rock of lazurite flecked with golden pyrite, prized for millennia as a gemstone and ultramarine pigment.

metamorphic
Shelly Limestone

Shelly Limestone

A limestone packed with visible shells and shell fragments, recording the accumulation of marine invertebrate remains on ancient sea floors.

sedimentary
Monzonite

Monzonite

An intermediate plutonic rock with nearly equal alkali and plagioclase feldspar and very little quartz, sitting between diorite and syenite.

igneous
Pyroxenite

Pyroxenite

A dense, dark ultramafic plutonic rock composed almost entirely of pyroxene minerals, often associated with peridotite and layered intrusions.

igneous