Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Thulite

A pink, manganese-rich variety of zoisite used as an ornamental gemstone, often mottled with white quartz and grey matrix.

Rutile is a major titanium ore and the famous golden needle inclusion that gives rutilated quartz its shimmering threads.

A jasper made of angular fragments naturally cemented back together, typically showing red and brown pieces in a quartz matrix.

A vivid blue-green hydrated copper silicate, soft on its own but prized as a gem when hardened by intergrown quartz or chalcedony.

Aquamarine crystals still attached to their natural host rock, prized as mineral specimens showing beryl in its original pocket setting.

Ancient chemically deposited rock of alternating iron-oxide and silica bands recording Earth's early oxygenation and a major iron ore source.

A banded, metamorphosed iron formation in which bright red jasper alternates with silvery hematite or magnetite layers.

A nodular rhyolite geode-like ball whose plain exterior hides a star-shaped agate or chalcedony core when cut.

A nickel sulfide famous for delicate brass-yellow hairlike crystals that form radiating sprays inside cavities and geodes.

Stibnite is the chief ore of antimony, famous for its dramatic clusters of bladed, silvery-gray metallic crystals.

A calcium carbonate mineral and polymorph of calcite, aragonite forms distinctive needle clusters, sea shells, and pearls.

A rosette-shaped cluster of bladed gypsum or barite crystals that traps sand, forming flower-like formations in arid deserts.