Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia
Search and identify 1,000+ rocks, minerals, crystals, and gemstones — with properties, formation, colors, hardness, and how to tell them apart.
Travertine
A banded, porous limestone deposited by mineral springs, prized as a warm-toned natural building and tile stone.
sedimentary
Lithographic Limestone
Extremely fine-grained, even-textured limestone famous for lithographic printing and for preserving exquisite fossils like Archaeopteryx.
sedimentary
Fossiliferous Limestone
Calcium-carbonate sedimentary rock packed with visible fossils, recording ancient marine life within an easily scratched, fizzing matrix.
sedimentary
Oolitic Limestone
Limestone built from tiny rounded ooid grains resembling fish roe, formed in warm, agitated shallow seas.
sedimentary
Cipollino Marble
A green-and-white banded metamorphic marble whose wavy mica layers resemble the rings of a sliced onion.
metamorphic
Septarian Concretion
A rounded sedimentary nodule cracked internally and filled with veins of yellow calcite, prized for its striking dragon-skin patterning.
sedimentary
Picasso Jasper
A marbled, abstractly patterned stone resembling modern art, technically a metamorphosed limestone rather than a true silica jasper.
metamorphic
Calc-schist
A foliated metamorphic rock of calcite mixed with mica, quartz, and calc-silicate minerals, derived from marly sediments.
metamorphic
Carbonatite
A rare igneous rock made mostly of carbonate minerals, source of the world's most important rare-earth-element and niobium deposits.
igneous
Geode
A hollow rock nodule whose interior cavity is lined with inward-pointing crystals such as quartz, amethyst, or calcite.
mineral
Limestone
A soft carbonate sedimentary rock made mostly of calcite, often packed with marine fossils and prone to forming caves.
sedimentary
Siderite
Siderite is an iron carbonate ore, a brown rhombohedral mineral of the calcite group found in sediments and veins.
mineral
Calcarenite
Sand-grained limestone composed of carbonate particles such as shell fragments and ooids cemented into a calcite rock.
sedimentary
Feruvite
A calcium- and ferrous-iron-rich tourmaline, the iron analogue of uvite, forming dark brown to black crystals in skarns and metamorphic rocks.
mineral
Anorthite
The calcium end-member of the plagioclase feldspar series, a high-temperature mineral common in mafic rocks, meteorites and lunar samples.
mineral
Fluorite
A soft, colorful calcium fluoride mineral famous for cubic crystals, perfect octahedral cleavage, and fluorescence under UV light.
mineral
Ugrandite Garnet
Ugrandite is the calcium garnet series uniting uvarovite, grossular, and andradite, including tsavorite and the fiery demantoid.
mineral
Scheelite
Scheelite is a calcium tungstate ore of tungsten, famous for its brilliant blue-white fluorescence under ultraviolet light.
mineral
Anhydrite
A water-free calcium sulfate mineral closely related to gypsum, forming in evaporite deposits and swelling into gypsum when it absorbs water.
mineral
Uvite
A calcium-magnesium tourmaline that forms in metamorphosed limestones, typically dark green to brown and often in well-formed crystals.
mineral
Topazolite Garnet
A rare yellow to golden variety of andradite garnet, the topaz-colored cousin of green demantoid, prized for high dispersion and brilliance.
gemstone
Hutcheonite
A titanium-aluminum garnet discovered in calcium-aluminum inclusions of the Allende meteorite, recording the earliest history of the solar system.
mineral
Grossular Garnet
The calcium-aluminum garnet species spanning green tsavorite, cinnamon hessonite, and colorless leuco garnet — one of the most varied garnets.
gemstone
Plagioclase
The most abundant rock-forming feldspar group, a continuous solid-solution series from sodium albite to calcium anorthite that builds much of the crust.
mineral