Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Outback Jasper

An earthy Australian-style jasper in red, ochre, and yellow tones evoking the colors of the Outback desert.

An earthy-toned jasper with vine-like or scenic patterning, valued by lapidaries for warm browns, reds, and creams that polish to a smooth finish.

Ceylon Garnet is a historic trade name for fine red almandine (and hessonite) garnet from the gem gravels of Sri Lanka.

A Mexican banded agate famous for tightly swirling, contorted lacy patterns in warm reds, creams, and golds.

Glacially deposited banded agates found along Lake Michigan beaches, small waterworn pebbles with concentric red and grey banding.

A vivid copper-bearing Mexican stone of red cuprite and green chrysocolla that evokes a desert sunset.

A chalcedony agate with red, orange, and yellow plume or banding patterns that rise like dancing flames within the stone.

A pleochroic aluminum silicate that flashes green and reddish-brown from different angles, with a cross-marked variety called chiastolite.

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

An uncommon purple to violet tourmaline colored by manganese, the deeper reddish-purple stones sometimes called siberite.