Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Polychrome Jasper

A warm earth-toned jasper from Madagascar in flowing reds, oranges and golds, also called desert jasper, discovered in the early 2000s.

A pale jasper crossed by distinctive blue-gray veins or lines, valued by lapidaries for its calm color contrast.

A patterned jasper whose scaly, net-like markings recall reptile skin, popular with lapidaries for its organic camouflage look.

A fine-grained, sodium-rich contact-metasomatic rock formed where shale is albitized next to intruding diabase or spilite.

A green-and-red ornamental stone of epidote and red piemontite or iron oxide, named for its dragon-skin coloring; not a true jasper.

A schist derived from clay-rich sediments, rich in mica and often bearing index minerals like garnet, staurolite, or kyanite.

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

An Australian green rhyolite with eye-like orbs and earthy patterns marketed as jasper, evoking dense rainforest foliage.

An opal cut to show chatoyancy, a sharp moving band of light like a cat's eye, usually in honey, green or yellow common opal.

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.