Marblewood

Marblewood is a South American hardwood with exotic color patterning. Unfinished, it's a light tan streaked with lines of dark violet. Finished, the tan takes on lustrous golden hues and the violet darkens further.

More info after the jump:

Marblewood is a tropical exotic hardwood. Tropical woods don't grow in the same pattern as temperate trees usually do. Think of a wood like red oak:

You can see the growth pattern, the rings in the wood, which is caused by the seasons. Good growing seasons mean faster growth, and a different appearance in the wood. Because for the most part it's always growing season in the tropics, tropical woods tend not to have the same kind of growth ring patterning. This makes tropical woods tend to be heavier, more dense, and harder than temperate woods, and in marblewood you can kind of see a consistent growing pattern that link long grains together the length of the wood.

The long grain has a tendency to splinter, tear out, and come apart from the board in long stretches. This is a bad thing. To counteract it, you need dead sharp tools, and you may even need to score each cut (cut a little depth before cutting through the whole piece) or to rise cut it (make multiple passes on each cut, cutting more material with each cut until you get through the whole piece).

It's got kind of a funny smell when you work it, which is probably due to the oils heating up when the saw cuts through the material.

Its stats are interesting too:
Janka hardness: 2,710 lbf (this puts it squarely in the "really freaking hard" category, twice as hard as white oak).

It's a dense wood at 62 lbs/cubic foot, which is almost exactly the density of water (62.3 lbs/cubic foot at standard temperature and pressure).