60 Fun Facts About Gobi Desert

The Gobi spans southern Mongolia and the north of which other country?

It is a cold desert and grassland region, and the sixth-largest desert in the world.

By area, where does the Gobi rank among the world's deserts?

Antarctica, the Arctic, the Sahara, the Arabian and the Australian deserts are all bigger.

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

The Chinese cognate gebi refers to rocky semi-deserts rather than sandy ones.

How long is the Gobi from south-west to north-east?

It is about 800 km from north to south and widest in the west, near Lake Bosten and Lop Nor.

Roughly what area does the Gobi cover?

That is about half a million square miles, or roughly the size of Peru.

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

Only pockets such as Khongoryn Els in the far south are classic dune fields.

Winter temperatures in the Gobi can plunge to about what?

Summer can reach 45 °C, and frost and snow sometimes settle on the dunes.

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

The plateau lies roughly 910 to 1,520 metres above sea level.

About how much rain falls in the Gobi each year on average?

Most of it falls in summer; extra moisture arrives in winter as wind-blown snow.

Some of the Gobi's winter moisture arrives as snow blown by wind from where?

The same winds drive the winter cold that makes this a cold desert.

Gobi temperatures can swing by as much as how many degrees Celsius within 24 hours?

Average winter minimums are about -21 °C and summer maximums about 27 °C.

The Gobi yielded the world's first known dinosaur eggs; in which year were they uncovered?

Twenty-six eggs averaging 23 centimetres long were found that year.

Which American explorer led the 1920s Central Asiatic Expeditions into the Gobi and reputedly inspired Indiana Jones?

He later became director of the American Museum of Natural History.

How did Andrews first get a job at the American Museum of Natural History?

Told there were no openings at his level, he swept floors in the taxidermy department and collected specimens on the side.

Andrews's 1920s expeditions crossed the Gobi in a fleet of cars from which manufacturer?

The motorcade drove west from Peking, supported by camel caravans carrying fuel.

In 1922 Andrews's party found a fossil of Paraceratherium, a gigantic hornless relative of which animal?

It was then called Baluchitherium and was among the largest land mammals ever.

The famous 1923 Gobi eggs were shown in 1995 to belong to which dinosaur, whose name means 'egg thief'?

The 'thief' found beside the nest turned out to be a parent brooding its own eggs.

The Flaming Cliffs are known in Mongolian as Bayanzag, meaning rich in what?

The shrub is the main firewood of steppe nomads; the cliffs are also famous for the first dinosaur eggs.

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

The film versions were modelled on the much larger Deinonychus.

Quill knobs on a Velociraptor forearm bone are direct evidence that it had what?

The specimen was about 1.5 metres long and weighed around 15 kilograms.

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

One theory is that a collapsing dune buried both animals mid-fight.

Mongolia's Fighting Dinosaurs were found in 1971 by an expedition partnered with which country?

The joint expeditions ran from 1963 to 1971 and also turned up the arms of Deinocheirus.

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

Some experts think it is simply an Asian Tyrannosaurus; its name means 'alarming lizard'.

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

Evgeny Maleev named it Tyrannosaurus bataar in 1955.

Deinocheirus, long known only from a pair of 2.4-metre arms, has a name meaning what?

Complete specimens described in 2014 revealed a hump-backed, duck-billed giant 11 metres long.

The Nemegt Basin in the Gobi is noted for fossils and prehistoric stone tools roughly how old?

The basin's river sediments also hold early mammals and dinosaur eggs.

According to the Gobi Bear Project, how many Gobi bears remain in the wild?

Known as mazaalai, they are the only bears adapted to a hot desert, and none live in captivity.

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

Only about 8% of its diet is animal protein, and there is no evidence it hunts large mammals.

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

Probably no other large mammal, not even the domestic Bactrian camel, can tolerate it.

China began testing nuclear weapons in 1964 at Lop Nur, a site that is home to which endangered animal?

The camels showed no apparent ill effects from the radiation and kept breeding.

The takhi, or Przewalski's horse, was reintroduced to the Great Gobi B reserve after being what?

It has 33 chromosome pairs to the domestic horse's 32, and neither is ancestral to the other.

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

Small sand avalanches produce a noise compared to an aircraft taking off.

The dunes of Khongoryn Els mostly rise to about 80 m, but the highest reach roughly what?

The dune belt runs 100 km or more along the foot of the Altai and is up to 12 km wide.

Gobi Gurvansaikhan, Mongolia's largest national park, is named for mountains meaning what?

The East, Middle and West Beauty subranges form the eastern half of the park.

Yolyn Am, a Gobi gorge that keeps a thick ice field well into summer, is named after which bird?

Yol is Mongolian for the bearded vulture, so the name is often rendered Valley of the Vultures.

The Mongolian death worm is often cited as inspiring the monsters of which film franchise?

Tales reached the West through Andrews's 1926 book On the Trail of Ancient Man; he did not believe in it.

The Gobi's legendary killer cryptid is called olgoi-khorkhoi in Mongolian, meaning 'large what'?

A 1922 description called it a two-foot sausage with no head or legs, deadly to touch.

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, whose name means Five Hills, is one of the world's largest untapped deposits of what?

It holds an estimated 6.4 billion tonnes, a quarter of it high-quality coking coal.

The Gobi is expanding into China at roughly what rate of grassland lost per year?

Overgrazing, deforestation, water depletion and climate change all drive the spread.

China's 'Green Great Wall' tree-planting programme to hold back the Gobi began in which year?

The Three-North Shelter Forest Program is due to run until 2050 across 12 provinces.

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

Trampling by livestock and off-road vehicles does the most damage in the wetter eastern Gobi.

The spring dust clouds that blow east from Mongolia and China are known across East Asia by what colour?

The clouds blow east over China, Korea and Japan; Korea's first record of one dates to 174 AD.

In which year was the Trans-Mongolian Railway, which crosses the Gobi to China, completed?

In Mongolia it was built by a Soviet penal unit of soldiers imprisoned for surrendering in the war.

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

Russian 1,520 mm track meets China's 1,435 mm standard gauge, so bogies are swapped.

The Silk Road oasis town of Dunhuang is best known for which nearby cave complex?

The 735 caves hold Buddhist art and a hoard of manuscripts found in a sealed chamber.

Jiayu Pass, the fortress at the western end of the Ming Great Wall, was built around which year?

It is the most intact ancient military building on the whole Wall.

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

The story goes that the builder calculated the materials so exactly that only one was spare.

Lop Nur was called the 'Wandering Lake' because which river kept changing course?

Sven Hedin proposed in 1900-01 that the river swung between a northern and a southern bed.

In the Lop Nur desert in 1933-34, Sven Hedin found ruins of signal towers that proved what?

The find stayed unknown to Chinese researchers until around 2000.

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

It is a low, sandy basin walled in by the Tibetan Plateau and the Pamirs.

Nikolai Przhevalsky argued the flat Alashan section of the Gobi was once the bed of what?

He pointed to the level ground, saline clay and salt lakes in its lowest parts.

The Gobi's south-eastern reaches wrap around the great northern loop of which river?

The Ordos Desert on that loop is part of the Alashan Plateau ecoregion.

Ömnögovi, the Mongolian province covering the heart of the Gobi, has which capital?

The town has the airport visitors use to reach the Flaming Cliffs and the national park.

Mongolians say the taana wild onion browsed by camels is essential to the hazelnut-like notes of what?

Airag is fermented milk; the Dzungarian Gobi is also said to produce the world's most aromatic mutton.

Roughly how many lizard species live along the Gobi's southern Mongolian border?

Lizards cope with the climate better than most animals; snow leopards and wolves only pass through.

How far does the Gobi stretch from north to south?

The desert is widest in the west, along the line joining Lake Bosten and Lop Nor.

The Gobi's eastern limit is marked by which mountain range on the border of Manchuria?

At its western end the desert begins at the foot of the Pamirs, some 40 degrees of longitude away.

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

That same range separates the basin from the sandy Taklamakan, which some geographers count as a separate desert.

Which of these unusual mammals is native to the Gobi?

Black-tailed gazelles, wild Bactrian camels and the Mongolian wild ass share the desert, with snow leopards and wolves as occasional visitors.