Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Riband Agate

A banded chalcedony with straight, ribbon-like parallel layers, often cut across the bands for striking striped cabochons.

A fine-grained, silica-rich volcanic rock that is the extrusive equivalent of granite, often pale, banded, or flow-textured.

A hard, fine-grained sedimentary silica rock that breaks with sharp conchoidal edges, prized by ancient toolmakers.

A prized plume agate from near Carey, Idaho, showing red, pink and black feathery plumes floating in translucent chalcedony.

An altered granite mottled pink and green from feldspar and epidote, popular as a tough, colorful ornamental rock.

A brown fossiliferous chalcedony packed with spiral freshwater snail shells, technically agatized fossil rock from Wyoming.

A soft sky-blue chalcedony from the Owyhee region of Oregon and Idaho, prized for its calming, opaque powder-blue color.

A richly colored red banded agate prized by lapidaries for its deep crimson-to-brown tones reminiscent of pigeon's blood.

A feldspar gemstone that sparkles with metallic glints (aventurescence) caused by tiny reflective copper or hematite platelets.

Clear quartz mined in the Himalayan region, often double-terminated and containing dark hematite or carbon inclusions.

Iron-stained sandstone whose red color comes from hematite coatings, formed in oxidizing desert, river, and coastal environments.