Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Sardonyx

A banded chalcedony combining reddish-brown sard with white or black onyx layers, prized since antiquity for carved cameos.

A fossiliferous jasper packed with spiral snail shells, technically a silicified gastropod limestone from Wyoming.

An opaque jasper from the Cave Creek area of Arizona, prized for earthy mottled and banded patterns in warm desert tones.

A rare, intensely blue chalcedony colored by copper-rich chrysocolla, prized as the most valuable of the blue chalcedonies.

A hollow rock nodule whose interior cavity is lined with inward-pointing crystals such as quartz, amethyst, or calcite.

A prized Oregon picture jasper from the Deschutes region known for soft scenic landscapes in cream, tan, and blue-gray.

Quartz containing a sealed pocket of ancient water, often with a mobile air bubble that moves when the crystal is tilted.

An opaque patterned jasper named for its scaly, snakeskin-like surface markings of interlocking tan and brown cells.

A black-and-white striped chalcedony-quartz rock whose bold zebra-like banding makes it a popular ornamental and lapidary stone.

A common opal containing moss- or fern-like mineral inclusions that resemble plants suspended in a pale silica body.

Ancient wood whose organic tissue has been replaced by silica, preserving the grain, rings, and structure of the original tree in stone.

A translucent, soft blue variety of microcrystalline quartz whose color comes from light scattering through its fine structure.

A black volcanic glass threaded with delicate grey, swirling lace-like bands of flow lines that show beautifully when polished.

A common rock-forming potassium feldspar, the Mohs hardness reference at 6, found in granites and used in ceramics and glassmaking.