The Gobi desert covers about 1.3 million square kilometres of northern China and southern Mongolia. It sits in the rain shadow of the Himalayas, which strip almost all the moisture out of the air before it gets there.
Unlike the Sahara, the Gobi gets bitterly cold. Winter temperatures can drop to minus 40°C, and you can even see snow on the dunes. The seasons swing so wildly that the same patch of ground might bake at 40°C in summer and freeze hard in January.
The Gobi has been one of the best places on Earth for finding dinosaur fossils. In 1923 an American team led by Roy Chapman Andrews dug up the world’s first known dinosaur eggs there. The desert keeps producing new species today, especially small feathered ones.
