Price: $18.99 - $10.99
(as of Mar 19, 2025 13:37:44 UTC – Details)
Did you know culinary salt is the mineral halite? Or that the pigment vermillion is powdered cinnabar, a mineral whose name comes from the Persian for “dragon’s blood”?
Discover the extraordinary mineral treasures that form our planet and that today we use in everything, from makeup and cookery to agriculture and high-tech.
Nature Guide Rocks and Minerals is your essential collector’s companion, with illustrated entries on hundreds of minerals, gems, and rocks from actinium to zirconium. Its breathtaking array includes organic minerals, such as pearls and corals, as well as silicates and “native elements” like gold.
Browse to find wonderful gems, including opals, or pyropes – a deep-red garnet the size of a hen’s egg. Nature Guide Rocks and Minerals reveals each mineral’s defining characteristics and explains how and where they were formed, how they were first identified, their uses, and their chemical composition.
Whether you are a geology student or starting your own collection, this fact-packed book is both a fascinating read and an essential identification guide.
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Publisher : DK; Illustrated edition (June 18, 2012)
Language : English
Flexibound : 352 pages
ISBN-10 : 0756690420
ISBN-13 : 978-0756690427
Item Weight : 1.3 pounds
Dimensions : 5.19 x 0.87 x 8.81 inches
Customers say
Customers find the book informative with clear pictures. They appreciate the layout and find it easy to read and understandable. The book is suitable for both kids and adult enthusiasts, making it a good choice for science classes.
Justy –
Smithsonian Nature Guide Rocks!
Love this reference book filled with so much information and great pictures along with their composition and profile. Handy guide to have around.
C. Thompson –
Good reference
This book is the best I have seen so far. It didn’t have everything I was looking for but no other books have either.
Tiffannie Feuerbach –
Fun birthday gif
Great pictures and full of information
Maria Kruger –
Great illustration
Great illustration and explanation of each item. Layout is easy and understandable. Highly recommended.
barbi –
Good!
Love this book and all if offers! Beautiful pictures
Michael –
Good pictures and information, but not useful as a field guide
This Rocks and Minerals guide has good pictures and a great amount of information on each rock/mineral/etc. for a compact size, and I would give it 5 stars for content, but I find it lacking a bit for use as a field identification guide, which is what I mainly wanted it for. Entries are organized first into chapters such as sulfide minerals, oxide minerals, halide minerals, silicates, igneous rocks, sedimentary rocks, metamorphic rocks, gemstones, etc. with e.g. mineral chapters grouped together and rock chapters grouped together. There is an index so if you know or have a pretty good idea what it is you’re looking at you can look it up.However, I can’t make sense of how entries are organized beyond the chapter level. They do not seem to follow any particular order. In some cases they seem to be “roughly” grouped by e.g. metal (like silver-based minerals may be together), or by hardness, or by crystal habit, but it is inconsistent even within one chapter (you won’t actually find all the silver-based minerals together, or the hardness in order, or all the cubic habits together, etc). Nor is there any index or search key based on these properties. Thus, if you pick up a hunk/crystal of some mineral there is no way (that I can see) to actually use the book to identify the mineral short of comparing the properties to each entry one by one. It would be much more useful as a field guide if (at least) each chapter were sorted in some way so that one could quickly find entries within a given hardness range or crystal shape, etc. As is, such properties for identifying a mineral are only useful for comparison to a given entry, but not for finding entries matching any given property.There may be a sorting order here that I’m just missing, but if there is one (it’s not even in alphabetical order) then the intro does not explain what that ordering is. I can only guess so far that it’s semi-random within any given chapter.
Amazon Customer –
good product!!
Perfect, Just What I needed!Thank you
Ken Stanley –
Educational book, love text and great pictures.
Love it. I use it to help me identify rocks & minerals
Antonio CP –
El libro llego en tiempo y forma, prácticamente en perfecto estado.En general considero que es una de las mejores guías visuales de rocas y minerales que hay. La fotografías seleccionadas son bonitas y de muy buena calidad. Los conceptos básicos están relativamente bien explicados.En el apartado negativo ésta el hecho de que no es formal en el apartado de las rocas, el autor comete errores al decir cuales son los minerales esenciales de tal tipo de roca. Sin embargo este problema no es exclusivo de esta guía pues se repite en casi todas ellas.
Victoria Hearn –
Very informative and the photos are high quality.
Gingi and Luna –
Beautiful, and with many large pictures inside 😀
mikee B –
Great book for beginner to intermediate from all ages, tons of awesome colour
Rebecca –
Not only does my geologist husband think this is a fantastic book, my seven year old son loves it, too! Standard reading when we get into the truck to go on a trip. My favorite feature of this book is that it shows examples of each rock or mineral in action, so my son gets to see where “in the real world” it would be used. Not complete geek-speak, but definitely not dumbed down. Great purchase!