Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Schorl

The common iron-rich black variety of tourmaline, by far the most abundant tourmaline species and a popular grounding crystal.

Transparent, colorless beryl (goshenite), the pure form of the species valued for its clarity, hardness, and well-formed crystals.

An opaque black garnet — typically titanium-bearing melanite andradite — historically cut for mourning and Victorian jewelry.

A glassy, often colorless silicate that forms pyramid-tipped cubes and is famed for its pearly basal cleavage and watery clarity.

A copper-bearing labradorite feldspar from Oregon, famous for its range of natural colors and glittery aventurescent copper schiller.

A warm golden-brown garnet named for its honey color, typically a hessonite grossular variety with a distinctive treacly internal texture.

A blue-violet zoisite found only in Tanzania, famous for its vivid trichroic color and rarity.

Vanadium-colored tourmaline, including the species vanadium dravite, producing rich emerald-green hues similar to chrome tourmaline.

A rare aluminum-rich species of the tourmaline group, usually colorless to pale, named for the Olenii Range in Russia's Kola Peninsula.

A rare iron-rich (ferric) species of the tourmaline group, dark brown to bronze-black, named after crystallographer Martin Buerger.

Phosphate-rich sedimentary rock, the world's main source of phosphorus for fertilizers, formed in nutrient-rich marine settings.

A feldspar, better known as sunstone, that sparkles with metallic glints from tiny mineral platelets, an effect called aventurescence.

A rare swirling lilac-to-violet silicate found only in Siberia, prized for its fibrous, chatoyant purple patterns.

One of the two jade minerals, an amphibole prized for its extreme toughness and soft, waxy green hues used in carving for millennia.

A hydrous aluminum garnet (hydrogrossular) intermediate between grossular and katoite, common in altered calcium-rich and serpentinized rocks.