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In 1500's Brazil, a conquistador mistakenly identified a dusty green tourmaline as emerald. This confusion lived on until the 1800's, when gem identification became sophisticated enough to identify it as a mineral species of its own in the 1800's. Tourmaline comes in such a wide variety of colors that it earned the name "tourmaline" from the Sinhalese word for "mixed gems". Similarly, rubellite is a rich, ruby-red color of tourmaline, which was once confused with ruby.