Gobi Desert Trivia
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59 free Gobi Desert trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
The Gobi is not the desert most people picture. It is cold, high and mostly bare rock, spread across southern Mongolia and northern China, where winter can hit -40 °C and the temperature can swing 35 degrees in a day. This quiz opens with that geography and climate (how big, how dry, why it is cold, what its name means) and then digs into the fossil beds that made it famous: the first dinosaur eggs ever found, Roy Chapman Andrews's car-borne expeditions, the turkey-sized real Velociraptor, the Fighting Dinosaurs, Tarbosaurus and the mysterious arms of Deinocheirus. From there it covers the living Gobi: the last few dozen Gobi bears, wild camels that drink water saltier than the sea, the reintroduced takhi, the Singing Sands, the ice gorge of Yolyn Am, the death worm legend, giant copper and coal mines, the railway that changes gauge at the Chinese border and the sandstorms that turn Beijing's sky yellow. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Gobi and its wildlife, fossils and landmarks, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Sahara, Mongolia and dinosaurs quizzes next.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which ancient trade route crossed the southern Gobi?
Silk Road
Silk Road. It crossed the desert's southern reaches, where bandits were a constant threat, so traders banded together in caravans for protection.
Q 02Which desert is the largest in Asia, ahead of the Gobi?
Arabian Desert
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.
Q 03The Gobi's name comes from a Mongolian word meaning what?
Dryland
Dryland. Dictionaries gloss the Mongolian word simply as 'desert', which makes the phrase 'Gobi Desert' say the same thing twice.
Q 04What is the name of the two-humped camel native to the Gobi?
Bactrian
Bactrian. Its two humps store fat, not water, and they shrink and flop to one side when food runs short.
Q 05The Gobi covers about 1.3 million km², roughly the size of which country?
Peru
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.
Q 06Rather than sand, most of the Gobi's surface resembles what?
Exposed bare rock
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.
Q 07Gobi winters can hit which temperature, the same in Celsius and Fahrenheit?
Minus 40
Minus 40. The two scales cross there, and by July the same desert can reach 45 °C, or 113 °F.
Q 08Besides its northerly latitude, what feature makes the Gobi a cold desert?
It sits on a high plateau
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.
Q 09The Gobi is dry partly because it lies in the rain shadow of which mountain range?
Himalayas
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.
Q 10The bitter winds that chill the Gobi each winter blow in mainly from where?
The Siberian steppes
The Siberian steppes. Each winter a vast dome of cold, dry air settles over Siberia, and its northerly winds sweep down across the Gobi.
Q 11Most of the Gobi's scant rain falls in which season?
Summer
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.
Q 12The first eggs recognised as a dinosaur's came from which Gobi site?
Flaming Cliffs
Flaming Cliffs. Its nests were the first proof that dinosaurs hatched from eggs, something scientists had until then only assumed.
Q 13Roy Chapman Andrews, who led 1920s fossil hunts across the Gobi, is often said to have inspired which fictional adventurer?
Indiana Jones
Indiana Jones. The resemblance only goes so far: during a 1928 Gobi field season Andrews accidentally shot himself with his own pistol.
Q 21The Fighting Dinosaurs fossil shows a Velociraptor locked in combat with which dinosaur?
Protoceratops
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.
Q 22Which film star agreed in 2015 to hand back a Gobi Tarbosaurus skull he had bought, unaware it was smuggled?
Nicolas Cage
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.
Q 23Tarbosaurus, apex predator of the Gobi's Nemegt Formation, is closest kin to which famous dinosaur?
Tyrannosaurus
Q 14Roy Chapman Andrews rose from janitor to director of which museum?
American Museum of Natural History
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.
Q 15Which medieval traveller wrote that spirit voices in the Gobi called stragglers by name and lured them to their deaths?
Marco Polo
Marco Polo. His book says caravans crossing the desert kept close together and hung a bell on every animal so that none could stray.
Q 16In 1922 Roy Chapman Andrews's team found Gobi fossils of Paraceratherium, a gigantic hornless relative of which animal?
Rhinoceros
Rhinoceros. It was one of the largest land mammals that ever lived, and its long neck let it browse leaves high in the trees.
Q 17The famous dinosaur eggs found in the Gobi in 1923 were shown in the 1990s to belong to which dinosaur?
Oviraptor
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.
Q 18Roy Chapman Andrews's 1920s Gobi expeditions hoped to prove Central Asia was the cradle of what, yet found no such fossils?
Humankind
Humankind. No early human remains turned up, but the search stumbled on something nobody had set out for: nests of dinosaur eggs.
Q 19The real Velociraptor, first found in the Gobi in 1923, was roughly the size of which animal?
A turkey
A turkey. The man-sized raptors of the Jurassic Park films were scaled up and modelled on its much larger relative Deinonychus.
Q 20In 2007 scientists found a row of small bumps on a Velociraptor forearm bone, proving it had what?
Feathers
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.
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'.
Q 24Which country joined the Mongolian expedition that dug up the first Tarbosaurus skull in 1946?
Soviet Union
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.
Q 25Deinocheirus, known for decades only from a pair of enormous arms found in the Gobi, has a name meaning what?
Horrible hand
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.
Q 26Which mouse-sized Gobi rodent with enormous ears bounds along on two hind legs like a tiny kangaroo?
Jerboa
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.
Q 27What makes up the bulk of the Gobi bear's diet?
Roots, berries and plants
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.
Q 28The Gobi's wild camels can survive on drinking water that is what?
Saltier than seawater
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.
Q 29From 1964 China used Lop Nur, a desert refuge of the last wild camels, as its test site for what?
Nuclear weapons
Nuclear weapons. The camels kept breeding regardless, and the closed military zone shielded them: hunters and miners only moved in once the testing stopped.
Q 30Which animal vanished from the Gobi last century, survived only in zoos, and has been released back there since 1992?
Przewalski's horse
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.