Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Spinel

A durable magnesium aluminum oxide gem that occurs in many colors and was long mistaken for ruby.

A hard zinc-rich member of the spinel group, usually dark blue-green to black, forming octahedral crystals in metamorphic and pegmatitic rocks.

Chromite is the only commercial ore of chromium, a black iron-chromium oxide of the spinel group found in mafic igneous rocks.

The most common type of mantle peridotite, made of olivine with both orthopyroxene and clinopyroxene, representing fertile upper-mantle rock.

A black spinel-group zinc iron oxide, essentially unique to Franklin, New Jersey, where it was a key zinc and manganese ore.

Black volcanic glass crossed by a fine network of grey or brown veins that resemble a spider's web.

A jasper crossed by fine dark veins forming a spiderweb-like network, often a brecciated stone cemented by darker matrix.

A banded agate whose internal structures resemble cathedral spires, arches, or a city skyline of towers and pinnacles.

A fossiliferous jasper packed with spiral snail shells, technically a silicified gastropod limestone from Wyoming.

A brown fossiliferous chalcedony packed with spiral freshwater snail shells, technically agatized fossil rock from Wyoming.

Quartz with a stepped, multi-pointed structure of parallel side crystals resembling the spires of a cathedral.