The Mongolian death worm

Mongolian herders of the Gobi tell of the olgoi-khorkhoi, the “large intestine worm”: a thick red thing about half a metre long that lives under the sand and is said to kill at a distance with venom or a shock. Expeditions have searched and found nothing, and the likeliest basis is a worm lizard or a sand boa, animals that really do look like a length of gut. What is entirely real is the Gobi itself, and the Flaming Cliffs nearby where the first dinosaur eggs known to science were found in 1923.