Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia
Search and identify 1,000+ rocks, minerals, crystals, and gemstones — with properties, formation, colors, hardness, and how to tell them apart.
Green Aventurine
A green quartz speckled with shimmering fuchsite mica that produces a glittering aventurescence, popular as an affordable ornamental stone.
mineral
Rutilated Quartz
Clear or smoky quartz threaded with golden to reddish needles of rutile, also poetically called Venus hair stone.
crystal
Flame Agate
A chalcedony agate with red, orange, and yellow plume or banding patterns that rise like dancing flames within the stone.
gemstone
Garnet
A group of silicate gemstones best known for deep red but spanning nearly every color, including green tsavorite and orange spessartine.
gemstoneAlabaster
A soft, fine-grained, translucent form of gypsum (or banded calcite) long prized as a carving and ornamental stone.
mineral
Hydrogrossular Garnet
A water-bearing massive grossular garnet, usually green or pink, widely used as a tough jade-like carving stone.
gemstone
Landscape Opal
A common opal containing dendritic or mossy mineral inclusions that form miniature landscape-like scenes inside the stone.
gemstoneFlame Jasper
A fiery jasper whose red, orange, and yellow plumes lick across the stone like flames against an earthy background.
mineralGary Green Jasper
An Oregon jasper, also called larsonite, of silicified fossil wood showing olive-green fields laced with black dendritic patterns.
mineral
Montana Moss Agate
A translucent chalcedony from Montana filled with black and red dendritic inclusions that look like moss, ferns, or scenic landscapes.
gemstone
Dumortierite Quartz
Quartz colored blue by inclusions of the mineral dumortierite, giving a denim-like blue ornamental stone harder than dumortierite alone.
gemstoneOnyx Marble
Translucent banded calcium-carbonate stone deposited in caves and springs, prized for ornamental carvings despite its softness.
sedimentaryParticolored Tourmaline
A tourmaline displaying two or more distinct colors in a single crystal, prized for natural color zoning like watermelon and bicolor stones.
gemstoneAurora Obsidian
A trade name for rainbow-sheen obsidian whose aligned nanoparticles produce shifting aurora-like bands of color.
igneousLemurian Seed Quartz
Clear quartz crystals marked by distinctive horizontal ladder-like striations, popularized from Brazil as a metaphysical stone.
crystal
Flower Agate
A creamy pink-and-white chalcedony from Madagascar containing flower-like plume inclusions that resemble blossoms suspended in stone.
gemstoneSpiderweb Jasper
A jasper crossed by fine dark veins forming a spiderweb-like network, often a brecciated stone cemented by darker matrix.
mineral
Mookaite
A vivid Australian jasper-like silica stone in earthy reds, yellows, and purples, formed from silicified radiolarian sediment.
mineral
Scoria
A dark, highly vesicular volcanic rock full of gas bubbles, denser than pumice, common as red or black lava rock.
igneousSesame Jasper
A finely speckled pale jasper trade stone named for its sesame-seed-like flecks, closely related to Kiwi Jasper.
mineral
Opal
A hydrated silica gemstone famous for its shimmering play-of-color, ranging from white and black opal to fiery orange fire opal.
gemstoneSardonyx
A banded chalcedony combining reddish-brown sard with white or black onyx layers, prized since antiquity for carved cameos.
gemstone
Red Agate
A red-toned banded chalcedony colored by iron oxides, ranging from natural carnelian-like reds to heat-treated stones.
gemstone
Pinfire Opal
A precious opal pattern made of tiny, densely packed pinpoint flashes of play-of-color, like sparkling speckles across the stone.
gemstone