Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia
Search and identify 1,000+ rocks, minerals, crystals, and gemstones — with properties, formation, colors, hardness, and how to tell them apart.
Pietersite
A brecciated, chatoyant quartz with swirling blue, gold, and brown fibers that shimmer like a stormy sky.
gemstone
Kimzeyite
A rare zirconium-bearing garnet that crystallizes in carbonatites and alkaline rocks, first described from Magnet Cove, Arkansas.
mineral
Bismuthinite
A soft lead-gray bismuth sulfide that is an important ore of bismuth, forming metallic needle-like and bladed crystals.
mineral
Star Rose Quartz
Rose quartz that displays a six-rayed star (asterism) when cut as a cabochon, caused by microscopic rutile-like inclusions.
gemstone
Dumortierite Quartz
Quartz colored blue by inclusions of the mineral dumortierite, giving a denim-like blue ornamental stone harder than dumortierite alone.
gemstone
Hawk's Eye
The blue-grey relative of tiger's eye, a chatoyant quartz showing a shifting band of light like a bird of prey's eye.
gemstone
Sylvanite
A silver-white gold-silver telluride and important gold-silver ore, noted for crystals arranged in writing-like graphic patterns.
mineralParticolored Tourmaline
A tourmaline displaying two or more distinct colors in a single crystal, prized for natural color zoning like watermelon and bicolor stones.
gemstone
Pineapple Opal
A rare opal pseudomorph from White Cliffs, Australia, formed as opal replaced clustered crystals into a pineapple-like shape.
gemstone
Cleavelandite
A striking platy, blade-like variety of albite feldspar that grows in fanned aggregates of thin white crystals within granite pegmatites.
mineral
Charnockite
A granite-like rock containing orthopyroxene, formed at high temperatures and pressures and often classed with the granulites.
igneous
Orbicular Granite
A rare granitic rock containing concentric, onion-like spheres called orbicules, prized as a striking ornamental stone.
igneous
Porcelanite
A hard, fine-grained siliceous rock with a dull porcelain-like texture, intermediate between soft diatomite and dense chert.
sedimentary
Bauxite
An earthy aluminum-rich residual rock and the world's principal ore of aluminum, often showing distinctive pea-like pisolites.
sedimentary
Trapiche Tourmaline
A rare tourmaline showing a fixed wheel-like pattern of color zones and arms radiating from the crystal's center.
gemstone
Schorlomite
A lustrous black titanium-rich garnet of the andradite series, found in alkaline igneous rocks like nepheline syenite and ijolite.
mineral