Gobi Desert — Bayanzag

Bayanzag, known to Western science as the "Flaming Cliffs" for the deep red colour of its eroded sandstone formations, was made famous by a 1920s American Museum of Natural History expedition led by Roy Chapman Andrews, which discovered the first scientifically documented dinosaur eggs here in 1923, along with numerous well-preserved dinosaur skeletons including the first complete Velociraptor and Protoceratops specimens. The cliffs continue to yield significant fossil finds, and the surrounding Gobi Desert is one of the richest dinosaur fossil regions in the world.

The same desert is the reputed home of the olgoi-khorkhoi, or Mongolian death worm — described in Mongolian oral tradition as a thick, blood-red worm up to a metre long that lives beneath the sand and kills people or animals that approach it, either by spraying a corrosive venom or by discharging an electric shock from a distance, without any need for direct contact. The creature was reported to Western audiences from the 1920s onward, including by Roy Chapman Andrews himself, who noted that Mongolian officials warned his expedition members against the creature with apparent sincerity. Numerous expeditions, including ones organised by British and Czech cryptozoologists in the 1990s and 2000s, have searched for physical evidence without success; proposed mundane explanations include the worm lizard (a limbless burrowing reptile) and the Tartar sand boa, both of which inhabit the region but match the death worm's described size and lethality only loosely.