Desert of Mongolia
Gobi dominates southern part of Mongolia. Although Gobi is known as a desert, it offers a startlingly diverse landscape, from grassy pastures to dinosaur fossil beds, lunar landscapes, red sandstone formations and white sand dunes and provides grazing for herds of camels, sheep and goats as well as some rare animals as snow leopard, ibex, wild sheep and goats, and antelopes. It also contains famous Gobi Gurvan Saikhan Mountains, a valley of which shelters a tiny ‘glacier’ in its surprising alpine-desert setting. Gobi is one of the richest fossil dinosaur sites in the world. It was at the Flaming Cliffs, in 1922, that Roy Chapman Andrews unearthed the first nest of dinosaur eggs the world had ever seen. Even today visitors can scour the area and come up with fragments of dinosaur eggshell or fossilized bones. Sand and sandy dunes occupy about 10% of the country’s territory.