Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Yellow Garnet

A trade term for yellow garnets, including golden grossular, yellow andradite (topazolite), and yellow-green Mali garnet.

The fine white marble of Mount Pentelikon used to build the Parthenon, famous for the golden patina it develops with age.

A rare grossular-andradite blend ('grandite') from Mali, prized for its high brilliance and golden-green to yellow color.

Grandite is an intermediate garnet between grossular and andradite, common in skarns and prized for vivid green to golden crystals.

The calcium-iron garnet species, ranging from brilliant green demantoid to golden topazolite and jet-black melanite.

A hard, brilliant fluorosilicate gemstone occurring in many colors, from precious golden imperial topaz to popular blue topaz.

A golden-brown chatoyant quartz with a shimmering silky band of light, formed when quartz replaces fibrous crocidolite.

Rutile is a major titanium ore and the famous golden needle inclusion that gives rutilated quartz its shimmering threads.

A banded combination rock of golden tiger's eye, red jasper, and metallic hematite, formed in ancient iron deposits.

Fine, golden, hair-like strands of basaltic volcanic glass spun from fluid lava droplets during eruptions, named for the Hawaiian volcano goddess.

A royal-blue feldspathoid mineral with white calcite veining, often confused with lapis lazuli but lacking its golden pyrite flecks.

A rare yellow to golden variety of andradite garnet, the topaz-colored cousin of green demantoid, prized for high dispersion and brilliance.

An intensely blue metamorphic rock of lazurite flecked with golden pyrite, prized for millennia as a gemstone and ultramarine pigment.

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

An unusually pure, transparent-to-translucent obsidian with few inclusions; truly water-clear specimens are rare in nature.