by Martine van der Westhuyzen

In the FOSAGAMS announcement of their coming Vivo outing in July, I read that, amongst other stones, dragon stone can be found at Vivo. I wondered what dragon stone could be, so I consulted our old friend Google to find out. This yielded such a diverse set of responses that it took me several hours to try to get to the bottom of the mystery. It included references to dragon stone, dragon blood stone, bloodstone, etc. – but are these all different kinds of stones?

 The website had the following photos of dragon's blood stone, also known as dragon stone, a fuchsitic chert they mine at Abydos, near Port Hedland in Western Australia:


Gemrock Auctions had this polished pink specimen of dragon blood stone jasper from Pilbara, Western Australia.


Then there was this Chinese chicken blood stone statue with carved dragons at This website mentions that the earliest discovered bloodstone was known as Zhejiang Chang rock pheasant bloodstone.


Chinese chicken blood stone is soft (Mohs hardness 3), making it easy to carve. 

Another website [] had these two photos. It says that Chinese chicken's blood stone is a sought-after material in China due to its bright red colour, as red is regarded as a very auspicious colour in China. It is also known as Changhua stone or Balinyouqi stone, after the mining sites in Zhejiang Province and Inner Mongolia. There is a legend from Changhua about a golden pheasant that was bitten by a snake while it flew over the mountain. Its blood fell into the cracks of the mountain, giving rise to the bright red colour of the stone.


Chicken's blood stone is a rock, rather than a mineral. It is composed of dickite, a polymorph of kaolinite, and quartz. It also contains cinnabar, from which it gets the bright red colour. Cinnabar is a dense mineral with a very high refractive index, making chicken's blood stone remarkably brilliant.

 This made me wonder – did rockhounds in ancient times mostly slay dragons and birds? The colour red is strongly associated with blood, so could this be the reason for names such as dragon's blood stone, chicken blood stone, rock pheasant blood stone? Not to forget pigeon blood red rubies!

 The following info and photos are from SpiritRock Shop [].

Septarian is also known as dragon stone, from an old Malagasy legend, which says that when the dragons died out, they fossilised as part of the sea bed that later became septarian, a form of sedimentary geode that resembles the scales of dragons. Septarian concretions or nodules have angular cavities or cracks, called septaria, from the Latin word septum (partition), which refers to the cracks or separations in this kind of rock. They are found in Utah, Madagascar and Morocco.

Septarian from Morocco, inside and outside view

 The mystery of the dragon stone that is found at Vivo came closer to a solution at The Crystal Rock Store, which had these dragon stone eggs on offer. It said they are from the Tshipise area in Limpopo, South Africa, made from a new dragon stone (green epidote and red piedmontite) that was recently discovered. But as the crow flies, Tshipise is 154 km from Vivo? So is this the same stone as the dragon stone found at Vivo? And is it the same as what we call bloodstone?


The website had these tumbled stones, saying: Dragon Stone is a newly discovered green and red jasper from South Africa. It is not the same as dragon's blood jasper.


Can anyone shed more light on the dragon stone found at Vivo?