Mongolian Death Worm

It was introduced to the West by the palaeontologist Roy Chapman Andrews, and how it happened matters: he did not collect herders' testimony in the desert — the Mongolian prime minister asked him about it at a cabinet meeting in Urga in May 1922, while the expedition's permits were being signed. Andrews wrote it down with explicit scepticism, and by 1932 called it "probably an entirely mythical animal", adding that he never found a Mongol willing to admit having seen it himself. The image that circulates today — dark red, a metre long, venom at a distance, electric shocks — is later, from Ivan Mackerle's expeditions in the 1990s, which found nothing either. And the most repeated zoological explanation does not hold: Mongolia has neither amphisbaenians nor skinks. The one serious candidate is the Tartar sand boa, Eryx tataricus, blunt at both ends and non-venomous.

In May 1922, in Urga — the city that would become Ulaanbaatar — an American paleontologist sat down with the Mongolian Cabinet to sign the permits that would let him drive motor cars into the Gobi. The contract was agreed, and then the Premier asked him for a favour. Roy Chapman Andrews was leading the Central Asiatic Expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History, and he was not looking for monsters. He was looking for the origins of humanity: his patron Henry Fairfield Osborn believed Central Asia was the cradle from which the great mammal groups, and perhaps our own ancestors, had spread. Andrews had cars, camels, a Swedish interpreter named F. A. Larsen who had lived in Mongolia for nearly forty years, and a shopping list of fossils. What the Premier wanted was something else entirely. "Then the Premier asked that, if it were possible, I should capture for the Mongolian government a specimen of the allergorhai-horhai," Andrews wrote in On the Trail of Ancient Man, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1926. He went on: "I doubt whether any of my scientific readers can identify this animal. I could, because I had heard of it often." Then the description: "None of those present ever had seen the creature, but they all firmly believed in its existence and described it minutely. It is shaped like a sausage about two feet long, has no head nor legs and is so poisonous that merely to touch it means instant death." That paragraph is the doorway through which the olgoi-khorkhoi entered Western print, and almost everything written about the Mongolian Death Worm since has added things Andrews did not say. The paragraph says nothing of acid, of killing at a distance, of electricity or of the colour red. Andrews recorded a description and, carefully, its provenance: the Premier "had never seen it himself, [but] knew a man who had and had lived to tell the tale", and a Cabinet Minister volunteered that "the cousin of his late wife's sister" had also seen it. Then Andrews made a joke — he would seize the thing with long steel collecting forceps and wear dark glasses so that the disastrous effects of even looking at it would be neutralised — and the meeting adjourned in good humour, permits signed. Ten years later Andrews returned to the subject in The New Conquest of Central Asia (American Museum of Natural History, 1932), and this time he gave it a heading of its own and a verdict. "This is probably an entirely mythical animal, but it may have some little basis in fact, for every northern Mongol firmly believes in it and will give essentially the same description." Then the sentence that most retellings leave out: "I have never yet found a Mongol who was willing to admit that he had actually seen it himself, although dozens say they know men who have. Moreover, whenever we went to a region which was said to be a favorite habitat of the beast, the Mongols at that particular spot said that it could be found in abundance a few miles away." He closed with an unusual piece of scientific honesty: "Were not the belief in its existence so firm and general, I would dismiss it as a myth. I report it here with the hope that future explorers of the Gobi may have better success than we had." The book's own index files it as "a probably mythical animal". So the man credited with discovering the Mongolian Death Worm never claimed it existed, never met a first-hand witness, and published it as a puzzle rather than a find. What he did find that season is why anyone remembers the expedition. On 1 September 1922 the caravan left Artsa Bogdo; three days later, while Andrews asked directions at a cluster of yurts, the photographer J. B. Shackelford walked half a mile north, stepped over the lip of a red basin nobody had mapped, and picked a white skull off a sandstone pinnacle, the skull of a Protoceratops. Walter Granger gathered shell fragments that proved to be dinosaur eggs. They named the place the Flaming Cliffs; it is now Bayanzag, the most famous fossil locality in Asia. The same eight weeks produced the dinosaur eggs and the death worm. The Mongolian side of this story is older and works differently. Ágnes Birtalan, a specialist in Mongol languages and folklore at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, told Atlas Obscura that oral traditions about the olgoi khorkhoi may go back generations, and that khorkhoi — usually translated "worm" — functions as a taboo name: a word many Mongol cultures used for animals considered dangerous, literally or metaphysically, and especially for snakes, including harmless ones. A taboo name is a way of speaking about something dangerous without naming it, and a failed species description is something else. The Soviet layer came next. According to reporting by Mark Hay for Atlas Obscura, the geographer A. D. Simukov in the 1920s and the paleontologist and novelist Ivan Yefremov in the 1940s both recorded Gobi accounts. Hay quotes a man in Dalanzadgad telling Yefremov in the mid-1940s: "Nobody knows what they are. But the olgoi khorkhoi is horror." In 1983 the conservationist Yuri Gorelov, told of a nest nearby, reached bare-handed into a burrow and pulled out a Tatar sand boa — a stubby, burrowing, non-venomous snake. Mongols he showed it to reportedly named it olgoi khorkhoi. The story then crossed into Central Europe. In 1990 the Czech engineer and adventurer Ivan Mackerle (1942-2013) flew to Ulaanbaatar with three companions and spent two months crossing the desert, borrowing a device from Dune to build a "thumper" that pounded the ground in the hope of drawing the animal up. He came back in 1992 with small explosives, and in 2004 with a light aircraft. He found nothing on any of the three trips, but his reports, photographs and documentaries turned a diffuse set of local accounts into a single marketable monster, red, fleshy and eyeless, even though, as Hay notes, most first-hand local accounts describe something short, brown and scaled. Richard Freeman's Centre for Fortean Zoology ran its own expedition in May 2005, distributing reward flyers in advance and setting traps, and also found nothing; the firsthand stories they gathered, dated 1930 to 2004, again mostly described short, brown-scaled, boa-like creatures. Late in life, Mackerle told Atlas Obscura he had grown "more skeptical about everything", and he had no plans to go back.

The death worm has no address, and Bayanzag — the Flaming Cliffs — is the one place in the story with fixed coordinates: 44°08′19″N, 103°43′40″E, in Bulgan sum of Ömnögovi province. Measured in a straight line from the published coordinates, that is about 84 km north-west of Dalanzadgad, the provincial capital, a town of 32,674 people at 1,470 metres and 540 km south of Ulaanbaatar. Andrews named the cliffs on the expedition of 1922, the same eight weeks in which he was asked to bring back an allergorhai-horhai, and his account of the basin floor "almost paved with bones" is chapter IX of On the Trail of Ancient Man. The cliffs are still an active fossil locality. The animal behind the name, if there is one, is most likely the Tatar sand boa, Eryx tataricus, the temeen suul mogoi. The 2006 Mongolian Red List of Reptiles and Amphibians places it between 700 and 1,800 metres of altitude, in low sandy hills, in dry riverbeds with saxaul, chiefly in the Borzongiin Govi, at Nogoon Tsav, at Toli Bulag, along the Ekh River in the Trans-Altai Gobi, with roughly a third of its Mongolian range inside protected areas. That list assesses it as Near Threatened, after entries as Rare in the Mongolian Red Books of 1987 and 1997, and it stands on Appendix II of CITES. It names mining and drought among the threats, along with the drying of water sources. Access to the strictly protected areas of the Trans-Altai Gobi runs on permits, and in practice on a vehicle with a local guide. Fees and seasons change, and none is reproduced here. Khorkhoi is a taboo word rather than a species name. When Ivan Mackerle went looking in 1992, a shaman told him the thing was, in Mackerle's own report, "not a living creature of flesh and blood" but "a supernatural evil being. [A] demon of the desert", and warned him against breaking local taboos. Mackerle went back three times and found nothing at all.