It's not every day – or every expedition – that begins with a request from a country's head of government formally requesting that a specimen be captured of a creature so elusive, and deadly, that western science does not even recognise its existence. Nevertheless, that is precisely what happened in 1922 when eminent American palaeontologist Prof. Roy Chapman Andrews met the Mongolian premier in order to obtain the necessary permits for the American Museum of Natural History's Central Asiatic Expedition to search for dinosaur fossils in the Gobi Desert. And the creature that the Mongolian premier instructed him to procure? None other than the lethal allghoi khorkhoi – or, as it is nowadays commonly referred to throughout the world, the Mongolian death worm. Read on...
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