Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Anthracite

The highest-rank coal, a hard, lustrous black rock that burns cleanly with little smoke and high heat output.

The lowest rank of coal, a soft brown carbon-rich rock formed from compacted peat, used mainly for electricity generation.

A hard, fine-grained siliceous rock built from the microscopic silica skeletons of radiolarians, often forming colorful ribbon-banded cherts.

A soft, lightweight siliceous sedimentary rock made of fossil diatom remains, prized as a fine natural abrasive and polishing powder.

Extremely fine-grained, even-textured limestone famous for lithographic printing and for preserving exquisite fossils like Archaeopteryx.

A soft carbonate sedimentary rock made mostly of calcite, often packed with marine fossils and prone to forming caves.

A quartz with a complex skeletal, layered surface of many terminations and etched recesses, also called skeletal or jacare quartz.

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

A soft, spongy accumulation of partly decayed plant matter that forms in waterlogged bogs and is the first step toward coal.

A fossiliferous limestone built largely from the disc-shaped skeletal plates of crinoids, marine animals known as sea lilies.

A dark green-and-black stromatolite jasper patterned with swirling orbs, formed from fossilized ancient microbial colonies.