Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Copper

A soft, reddish native metal with excellent conductivity, mined for wiring, plumbing, and alloys like bronze and brass.

Clear or smoky quartz threaded with golden to reddish needles of rutile, also poetically called Venus hair stone.

A reddish-brown rare-earth phosphate that is a primary ore of cerium, thorium and other rare-earth elements, often found in placer sands.

A rare garnet that dramatically shifts color from greenish in daylight to reddish under lamplight, rivaling alexandrite.

The calcium-aluminum garnet species spanning green tsavorite, cinnamon hessonite, and colorless leuco garnet — one of the most varied garnets.

Agate that was shattered and naturally re-cemented by silica, creating a mosaic of angular fragments in a quartz matrix.

Tabular quartz crossed by a milky white thread-like line marking where the crystal repeatedly cracked and re-healed.

A fractured and re-cemented agate whose angular broken bands resemble crumbling walls and ruined cityscapes when polished.