59 Fun Facts About Gobi Desert

Which ancient trade route crossed the southern Gobi?

Silk Road. It crossed the desert's southern reaches, where bandits were a constant threat, so traders banded together in caravans for protection.

Which desert is the largest in Asia, ahead of the Gobi?

Arabian Desert. The Arabian Peninsula is part of Asia, so its desert outranks the Gobi, and its Empty Quarter alone is the largest unbroken sea of sand on Earth.

The Gobi's name comes from a Mongolian word meaning what?

Dryland. Dictionaries gloss the Mongolian word simply as 'desert', which makes the phrase 'Gobi Desert' say the same thing twice.

What is the name of the two-humped camel native to the Gobi?

Bactrian. Its two humps store fat, not water, and they shrink and flop to one side when food runs short.

The Gobi covers about 1.3 million km², roughly the size of which country?

Peru. Both cover close to 1.3 million km², a span so wide that the Gobi's eastern side gets far more rain than its west, enough to graze livestock.

Rather than sand, most of the Gobi's surface resembles what?

Exposed bare rock. The surface is firm enough to drive across for long distances, which is how fossil hunters in the 1920s crossed it in a fleet of motor cars.

Gobi winters can hit which temperature, the same in Celsius and Fahrenheit?

Minus 40. The two scales cross there, and by July the same desert can reach 45 °C, or 113 °F.

Besides its northerly latitude, what feature makes the Gobi a cold desert?

It sits on a high plateau. The altitude adds to the cold, and the weather turns fast: temperatures can swing sharply within a single day.

The Gobi is dry partly because it lies in the rain shadow of which mountain range?

Himalayas. Moist air rising over the mountains drops its rain on the windward side, so what crosses to the Gobi, already far from any ocean, arrives dry.

The bitter winds that chill the Gobi each winter blow in mainly from where?

The Siberian steppes. Each winter a vast dome of cold, dry air settles over Siberia, and its northerly winds sweep down across the Gobi.

Most of the Gobi's scant rain falls in which season?

Summer. That is when the tail of the Asian monsoon reaches the desert's eastern side, bringing most of what little rain the Gobi gets.

The first eggs recognised as a dinosaur's came from which Gobi site?

Flaming Cliffs. Its nests were the first proof that dinosaurs hatched from eggs, something scientists had until then only assumed.

Roy Chapman Andrews, who led 1920s fossil hunts across the Gobi, is often said to have inspired which fictional adventurer?

Indiana Jones. The resemblance only goes so far: during a 1928 Gobi field season Andrews accidentally shot himself with his own pistol.

Roy Chapman Andrews rose from janitor to director of which museum?

American Museum of Natural History. Told there were no openings, he scrubbed floors in its taxidermy department, then led its Gobi expeditions and ended up running the place.

Which medieval traveller wrote that spirit voices in the Gobi called stragglers by name and lured them to their deaths?

Marco Polo. His book says caravans crossing the desert kept close together and hung a bell on every animal so that none could stray.

In 1922 Roy Chapman Andrews's team found Gobi fossils of Paraceratherium, a gigantic hornless relative of which animal?

Rhinoceros. It was one of the largest land mammals that ever lived, and its long neck let it browse leaves high in the trees.

The famous dinosaur eggs found in the Gobi in 1923 were shown in the 1990s to belong to which dinosaur?

Oviraptor. Its name means 'egg thief' because it was found lying on the nest, but it turned out to be a parent brooding its own eggs, much as birds do.

Roy Chapman Andrews's 1920s Gobi expeditions hoped to prove Central Asia was the cradle of what, yet found no such fossils?

Humankind. No early human remains turned up, but the search stumbled on something nobody had set out for: nests of dinosaur eggs.

The real Velociraptor, first found in the Gobi in 1923, was roughly the size of which animal?

A turkey. The man-sized raptors of the Jurassic Park films were scaled up and modelled on its much larger relative Deinonychus.

In 2007 scientists found a row of small bumps on a Velociraptor forearm bone, proving it had what?

Feathers. The bumps are quill knobs, the same anchor points that hold wing feathers on living birds, yet its arms were far too short for flight.

The Fighting Dinosaurs fossil shows a Velociraptor locked in combat with which dinosaur?

Protoceratops. The raptor's foot claw is still sunk in its neck while its beak clamps the raptor's arm, and a sudden flow of sand may have buried both mid-fight.

Which film star agreed in 2015 to hand back a Gobi Tarbosaurus skull he had bought, unaware it was smuggled?

Nicolas Cage. He had paid $276,000 for it in 2007, reportedly outbidding Leonardo DiCaprio, and gave it up once investigators found it had been taken illegally from Mongolia.

Tarbosaurus, apex predator of the Gobi's Nemegt Formation, is closest kin to which famous dinosaur?

Tyrannosaurus. The two are so alike that some experts treat it as an Asian species of the same genus; its own name means 'alarming lizard'.

Which country joined the Mongolian expedition that dug up the first Tarbosaurus skull in 1946?

Soviet Union. Among its fossil hunters was Ivan Yefremov, who became a leading Soviet science-fiction novelist; one species from the digs was named efremovi after him.

Deinocheirus, known for decades only from a pair of enormous arms found in the Gobi, has a name meaning what?

Horrible hand. For decades those clawed arms were all anyone had, until skeletons described in 2014 revealed a hump-backed giant with a beak like a duck's.

Which mouse-sized Gobi rodent with enormous ears bounds along on two hind legs like a tiny kangaroo?

Jerboa. The long-eared jerboa bounds on two long hind legs, and tufts of stiff hair under its feet work like snowshoes on loose sand.

What makes up the bulk of the Gobi bear's diet?

Roots, berries and plants. The little meat it eats is mostly rodents, and pickings are so thin that Mongolia sets out feed pellets to help the bears get by.

The Gobi's wild camels can survive on drinking water that is what?

Saltier than seawater. It drinks from salty desert springs, and probably no other large land mammal, not even the domestic camel, could stomach the water.

From 1964 China used Lop Nur, a desert refuge of the last wild camels, as its test site for what?

Nuclear weapons. The camels kept breeding regardless, and the closed military zone shielded them: hunters and miners only moved in once the testing stopped.

Which animal vanished from the Gobi last century, survived only in zoos, and has been released back there since 1992?

Przewalski's horse. Every one alive descends from about a dozen animals kept in zoos, and herds set free in reserves such as Great Gobi B now roam the desert again.

Khongoryn Els in the southern Gobi is nicknamed what, for the sound its dunes make?

The Singing Sands. The dunes hum when wind shifts the sand or a slope gives way in a small avalanche, and visitors can set the sound off themselves by sliding down.

Yolyn Am, a Gobi gorge so narrow that sunlight barely reaches its floor, holds what for much of the year?

Thick ice. It builds up over winter and, with the sun shut out by the gorge walls, lingers for months while the desert outside bakes.

Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park in southern Mongolia is named for a mountain range whose name means what?

Three Beauties. They are three neighbouring ridges, the East, Middle and West Beauty, which rise from the plains at the eastern end of the Gobi Altai.

Yolyn Am, a Gobi gorge, is named after the lammergeier, a vulture famous for dropping what from a height onto rocks?

Bones. It lives mostly on bone and marrow, carrying pieces too big to swallow high into the air and smashing them on the rocks below; yol is its Mongolian name.

Gobi legend tells of the olgoi-khorkhoi, a sausage-shaped creature said to kill at a touch, known in English as the Mongolian what?

Death worm. Its Mongolian name means 'intestine worm', and when Gobi locals were shown a harmless sand boa they said that snake was the creature they feared.

Which ostrich-like dinosaur, first dug up in the Gobi, stampedes in a flock past the heroes of the 1993 film Jurassic Park?

Gallimimus. The film may have got the flock right: several skeletons found in one Gobi bone bed seem to have died together, a hint that it lived in groups.

Oyu Tolgoi, the huge south-Gobi mine whose name means Turquoise Hill, mainly produces which metals?

It is the largest financial undertaking in Mongolia's history and shipped its first copper in 2013.

Tavan Tolgoi, a vast south-Gobi deposit whose name means Five Hills, supplies China's steel mills with what?

Coal. Much of it is coking coal, the grade that steelmakers need, which is why the mine's fortunes rise and fall with China's steel industry.

Dust storms that rise in the Gobi regularly blanket the cities of which country?

South Korea. Prevailing winds carry the dust across Korea and on to Japan, and some is lofted high enough to cross the Pacific and settle over North America.

China's 'Green Great Wall', begun in 1978 against the Gobi, is made of what?

Planted trees. Planting is due to run until 2050, but the uniform stands, mostly poplar and willow, have proved easy prey for disease.

Mongolian grasslands around the Gobi have been degraded by goats raised for which product?

Cashmere. Goats are hard on pasture: their sharp hooves cut up the topsoil and they tear plants out by the roots, so grazed land struggles to grow back.

In March 2021 Gobi dust turned the sky orange over which capital during its worst sandstorm in a decade?

Beijing. Hundreds of flights were cancelled as the dust arrived on strong winds from Mongolia, pushing pollution readings in parts of the city off the scale.

The Trans-Mongolian Railway, which crosses the Gobi to China, leaves the Trans-Siberian at which Russian city?

Ulan-Ude. Trains from Moscow follow the Trans-Siberian for more than half the journey, then fork south there to cross Mongolia and the Gobi.

At Erenhot on the Chinese border, what must happen to Trans-Mongolian trains before they continue?

Their wheel gauge is changed. Mongolia's Russian-gauge track is nearly nine centimetres wider than China's, so each carriage is lifted on jacks and its wheel sets are swapped before it rolls on.

The Mogao Caves near the Gobi oasis of Dunhuang are filled with centuries of murals and statues from which religion?

Buddhism. A library walled up there around the year 1000 was reopened in 1900, and among its scrolls was the Diamond Sutra of 868, the oldest dated printed book in existence.

Jiayu Pass, the Gobi fortress where the best-preserved line of the Great Wall ends in the west, dates from which dynasty?

Ming. Work began around 1372, only a few years into the dynasty, to plug the narrowest point of the corridor through which any attack from the north-west would have to come.

By legend, what was left over when Jiayu Pass was finished and placed loose on a gate?

A single brick. The story goes that the builder's estimate of 99,999 bricks was so exact that just one was left over, and a lone brick is said to sit at the fort to this day.

Explorers disagreed over where to map Lop Nur, a desert lake Sven Hedin gave what nickname?

Wandering Lake. The river feeding it kept switching beds, so the lake moved with it; upstream reservoirs and irrigation then dried it to a salt crust by the 1970s.

What is the Mongolian word for the round felt tent, known to outsiders as a yurt, that Gobi herders live in?

Ger. It is built to move: the whole home comes apart and travels to the next pasture on the backs of a few pack animals such as camels or yaks.

Some geographers treat the Gobi's far-western basin around the Tarim as a separate desert called what?

Taklamakan. High mountains wall its sand sea in on three sides, and caravans chose to skirt its edges rather than cross it.

The Badain Jaran, a Gobi sand sea with some of Earth's tallest dunes, hides dozens of what between them?

Lakes. Groundwater wells up to feed them in a desert with almost no rain, and the same hidden moisture is thought to help hold the giant dunes in place.

In the south-east the Gobi reaches the great northern bend of which river?

Yellow. The land inside the bend is the Ordos, itself largely desert, and the Great Wall runs along its southern edge, marking where the sands give way to farmland.

In 2003 a rocket from Jiuquan, a launch base in the Gobi, carried China's first what into orbit?

Astronaut. Yang Liwei, a former fighter pilot whose name was made public only a day before launch, circled the Earth 14 times in 21 hours and came down in Inner Mongolia.

Which big cat hunts ibex and wild sheep in the mountains of Mongolia's Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park?

Snow leopard. For all its size it cannot roar, and its extra-long tail serves both as a balance on steep crags and as a wrap against the cold.

What kind of animal joined runner Dion Leonard for nearly 80 miles of a 2016 ultramarathon across the Gobi?

A dog. He named the little stray Gobi and still finished second, but she later went missing in China, and it took a search joined by strangers around the world to reunite them.

In the Gobi documentary The Story of the Weeping Camel, herders coax a mother camel to accept her rejected calf using what?

Music. A player of the morin khuur, a Mongolian string instrument, is fetched from afar, and as a herder sings along the mother sheds tears and lets her calf feed; the film earned an Oscar nomination.

The Greater Khingan mountains mark the Gobi's eastern limit, separating the desert from the plains of which historic region?

Manchuria. The range that ends the desert is anything but barren: larch and pine forests cover its cold northern reaches, and one fire in 1987 swept about 10,000 square km there.

The Dzungarian Basin semi-desert lies between the Altai mountains and which range to the south?

Tian Shan. Its peaks stay snow-capped all year, and the streams running off them water a ring of oasis towns and farms along the basin's dry southern edge.

Which flat-faced, thick-furred small wild cat of the Mongolian steppe and Gobi is also known as the manul?

Pallas's cat. Its ears sit low on the sides of its head, so it can peer over a rock while showing little of itself, and its pupils narrow to round dots rather than the slits of most small cats.