Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Pumpkin Obsidian

An orange-to-rust colored variety of natural volcanic glass whose warm tone comes from iron oxide staining within the obsidian.

A cream-colored feldspar-and-quartz rock peppered with dark spots, named for its resemblance to a Dalmatian dog.

An opaque grey-brown common opal forming nodules and concretions, historically called liver opal for its dull brownish color.

A waxy, translucent microcrystalline form of quartz that serves as the parent group for agate, jasper, carnelian, and onyx.

An agate whose layered, segmented banding resembles the jointed stalks and leaves of bamboo.

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

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

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

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

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 clean, mature sandstone made almost entirely of quartz grains, representing extreme weathering, sorting, and recycling of sediment.

A vivid green hydrous nickel-magnesium silicate that is a major ore of nickel, mined from weathered ultramafic rocks.

A chromium-rich pyrope garnet whose intense blood-red color comes from chromium, often mined from ant hills and kimberlite weathering.