Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Kyanite

A bladed aluminosilicate famous for having two very different hardnesses depending on the direction you scratch it.

A striking blue aluminum silicate famous for bladed crystals and anisotropic hardness that differs dramatically along and across the blade.

A mica schist containing bladed blue kyanite crystals, a marker of medium- to high-grade metamorphism of aluminous rocks.

A rare high-pressure metamorphic schist defined by the diagnostic assemblage of talc plus kyanite, often pale and silvery.

A mica schist studded with brown staurolite porphyroblasts, sometimes forming the cross-shaped twins known as fairy stones.

A striking platy, blade-like variety of albite feldspar that grows in fanned aggregates of thin white crystals within granite pegmatites.

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

Wolframite is the historic principal ore of tungsten, a heavy black tungstate forming bladed crystals in granite veins.

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

A soft lead-gray bismuth sulfide that is an important ore of bismuth, forming metallic needle-like and bladed crystals.

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

The rarest and most valuable opal, with a dark body tone that makes its flashing rainbow play-of-color blaze brilliantly.