Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Gold

A dense, soft, intensely yellow native metal valued for millennia in coinage, jewelry, and electronics.

A dense, durable, silvery-white precious metal that resists corrosion, used in fine jewelry and catalytic converters.

A green, gold-associated metamorphic rock made of chrome-rich mica and quartz, named for Mariposa County in California's gold country.

Natural emerald crystals still embedded in their host rock, prized as mineral specimens that show how the gem grew in place.

A trade name occasionally used for golden-yellow beryl (golden beryl or heliodor), the iron-colored yellow variety of the emerald mineral.

A warm golden-yellow elbaite tourmaline colored by manganese, ranging from honey to bright canary tones.

A green, vanadium-dominant garnet that forms in vanadium-rich metamorphic and sedimentary rocks, notably in uranium-vanadium districts.

A dark, mineral-rich dike rock with abundant mica or amphibole phenocrysts set in a fine groundmass, often associated with gold and diamonds.

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

A metamorphic rock made chiefly of manganese-rich spessartine garnet and quartz, formed from ancient manganese-bearing sediments.

A warm mustard-to-ochre yellow jasper colored by iron, valued by lapidaries for its rich, earthy golden tone.

A warm mustard to brownish-yellow tourmaline, colored by iron or manganese, sitting between yellow and brown dravite tones.

Clear or smoky quartz threaded with golden to reddish needles of rutile, also poetically called Venus hair stone.

An intensely blue metamorphic rock of lazurite flecked with golden pyrite, prized for millennia as a gemstone and ultramarine pigment.

A banded combination rock of golden tiger's eye, red jasper, and metallic hematite, formed in ancient iron deposits.