Habitos Minerales

Acicular Habit
Acicular means needlelike. This mineral is actinolite.

Photo (c) Andrew Alden, licensed to About.com
Amygdaloidal Habit
Amygdaloidal means almond-shaped, but it refers to theformer gas bubbles in lava called amygdules, cavities that have become filled with various minerals.

Banded Habit
"Banded" is a broadly layered texture. This rhodochrosite specimen might be calledstalactitic, lamellar, geode, or concentric if it were curved differently.

Bladed Habit
Bladed crystals are longer and thinner than tabular crystals but stubbier than acicular crystals. Kyanite isa common example. In rock shops, look for stibnite.

Blocky Habit
A blocky habit is squarer than equant and shorter than prismatic. This mineral is pyrite on quartz.

Botryoidal Habit
Inscientific Latin, botryoidal means "like grapes." Carbonate, sulfate and iron oxide minerals tend to have this habit. This specimen is barite.

Cruciform Habit
The cruciform (cross-shaped) habit is theresult of twinning. Staurolite, shown here, is well known for favoring this habit.

Dendritic Habit
Dendritic means "like branches." It can refer to flat crystals, like those of manganese oxides, orthree-dimensional forms like this specimen of native copper.

Drusy Habit
Druses are openings inside rocks that are lined with projecting crystals. Amethyst, cut from geodes, is commonly sold inrock shops for its pretty drusy habit.

Encrusting Habit
Calcite, the main component of limestone, commonly dissolves to be deposited elsewhere as a crust. Chips in this specimen show how it coatsthe underlying rock.

Equant Habit
Crystals of nearly equal dimensions, like these pyrite crystals, are equant. Those on the left might be called blocky. Those on the right are pyritohedrons.Fibrous Habit
Rutile is typically prismatic, but it can form whiskers as in this rutilated quartz. Curved or bent fibrous minerals are called capillary or filiform instead.

Geode
Geodes are rocks...