Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Mudstone

A fine-grained sedimentary rock of compacted clay and silt that, unlike shale, breaks in blocks rather than thin layers.

A clastic sedimentary rock made of cemented sand grains, often quartz, recording ancient beaches, deserts, and rivers.

A very fine-grained, mud-sized limestone formed from carbonate mud, smooth and dense with conchoidal fracture.

The most common sedimentary rock, a fissile mudrock of compacted clay and silt that splits into thin layers.

A poorly sorted, muddy sandstone with abundant clay matrix between its grains, typically dark and deposited by turbidity currents.

Hardened, fine-grained mudrock intermediate between shale and slate, dense and non-fissile, often carved into ornaments.

A very fine-grained sedimentary rock made mostly of clay minerals, smooth to the touch and lacking the gritty feel of siltstone.

A dark, organic-rich shale loaded with kerogen and bitumen that can yield oil and gas, often finely laminated and combustible.

A coarse sedimentary rock of rounded pebbles and gravel cemented in a finer matrix, recording ancient rivers and beaches.

A fine-grained clastic rock of silt-sized grains, intermediate between sandstone and mudstone, with a gritty feel.

A very fine-grained limestone made of microcrystalline calcite mud, dense and smooth, deposited in calm carbonate settings.

A soft, fine-grained red metamorphosed claystone, sacred to many Native American peoples and carved into ceremonial pipes.

A general term for light-colored, fine-grained volcanic rocks rich in quartz and feldspar, like rhyolite.

Extremely fine-grained, even-textured limestone famous for lithographic printing and for preserving exquisite fossils like Archaeopteryx.

A hard, fine-grained siliceous rock with a dull porcelain-like texture, intermediate between soft diatomite and dense chert.