You can also try to scratch a piece of glass or unglazed ceramic with the gold portion of the rock.
Real gold rock pictures.
Gold can look many different ways in nature but it is important to know the difference between gold and the other minerals.
While each piece can look quite a bit different it s pretty easy to know what real gold looks.
Gold nuggets are all somewhat different.
The ore is often brown iron stained rock or massive white quartz and usually contains only minute traces of gold.
All of the pictures on this page are real genuine natural gold nuggets.
The color of pure gold is bright golden yellow but the greater the silver content the whiter its color is.
They can vary quite a bit not only in shape and texture but also in purity and brightness.
Once you have seen a few pictures of real gold it is pretty easy to distinguish from the other stuff.
Real gold will not scratch these substances.
These rocks are almost never real gold.
To extract the gold the ore is.
Much of the gold mined is actually from gold ore rather then actual gold specimens.
A copper penny and a tiny gold nugget on a black streak plate with a small streak made by the nugget.
In fact actual pieces of gold ore doesn t usually look shiny.
Check out some of the pictures throughout our website of the various gold nuggets and gold specimens.
If you re interested in rock collecting you know that rocks you find in the real world rarely look like the polished specimens you see you rock shops or museums.
Placer gold roughly 75 to 95 percent real gold comes in a variety of shapes and sizes from small flakes to large bumpy nuggets.
There are lots of gold colored rocks out there that could be a variety of different minerals.
If the quartz sticks to the magnet then it contains iron pyrite or fool s gold.
Pyrite mica and a variety of other minerals are most commonly confused with actual gold.
Gold and silver are obtained from a variety of ores.
One of the ways to find raw gold begins with panning for it in creeks or rivers fed by eroded gold from mine or natural deposits in rock formations above the water sources.
In this index you ll find pictures of minerals like those you ll most likely encounter in your expeditions.
Most people think of nuggets and such but the truth is that very little comes from nuggets nearly all newly mined gold comes from ores mined from the natural hard rocks that contain gold in tiny even microscopic particles.