What is the purpose of prospecting ore rocks in RuneScape?

In Oldschool RuneScape (and, to this date, RS3 as well) you can prospect any ore rock. But I never understood the purpose of this feature. Visually, it's very obvious which kind of rock you're mining, there is no real need to prospect the rock and you don't gain any experience either.

Are there some extra benefits from prospecting a rock that I am missing?

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2 Answers

In the past there was no difference in appearance for when a rock was mined or if it had ore. With prospecting you could determine if it was mineable.

They never removed this feature after a rock would turn grey when mined so that new player can use this to learn what color can be associated with what ore.

Reference:RuneScape Wiki

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While it may be obvious to you now which ores an ore rock may give, this was not always the case. Prospecting a rock was the only way in the early days to find out which ore a rock gave before mining it. If you did not have the mining level to mine that rock, you could not find out which ore the rock gave.

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