Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Chrome Pyrope

A chromium-rich pyrope garnet whose intense blood-red color comes from chromium, often mined from ant hills and kimberlite weathering.

Small, bright chrome-pyrope garnets famously brought to the surface by harvester ants on the Navajo lands of Arizona.

Masasi Blue Garnet is a rare vanadium-bearing color-change garnet from Tanzania that appears blue-green by day and purplish-red indoors.

Lindi Garnet is a rare vanadium-rich color-change garnet from Tanzania's Lindi region, shifting from blue-green daylight tones to purple-red.

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

A bronze-colored iron sulfide notable for being the most magnetic of the common sulfide minerals and an important nickel host.

A water-bearing massive grossular garnet, usually green or pink, widely used as a tough jade-like carving stone.

A vivid green chromium-bearing diopside, an affordable emerald-like gem mined largely in Siberia.

A soft lead-gray bismuth sulfide that is an important ore of bismuth, forming metallic needle-like and bladed crystals.

A pale jasper threaded with black, fern-like mineral dendrites that mimic plants, trees, and frost despite being inorganic.