general
A cryptid reported most often in the south Gobi desert, the Mongolian Death Worm, or Allghoi khorkhoi in the Mongolian tongue, is as terrifying as its name implies. The Mongolian Death Worm, resembling a length of salami, can allegedly kill from a distance as well as through contact. The Mongolian Death Worm's ability to kill from a distance is accomplished through a directed jet of corrosive acid sprayed from one of its two blunt ends. The worm can also discharge enough electricity to kill humans and large pack animals alike.
The Mongolian Death Worm spends most of its time burrowed underground. It surfaces for unknown reasons, but many more sightings occur directly following heavy rains.
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description/appearance
Though accounts vary, the Mongolian Death Worm is most commonly described by local witnesses as being between two to four feet in length (0.6 x 1.2 meters) with two truncated ends. The head and tail of the worm, assuming it has both a head and a tail, do not gently taper to points like that of a snake's tail, but instead end abruptly like an earthworm's. The Mongolian Death Worm has no discernable eyes causing its head and tail to be indistinguishable one from another.
Though always legless in retellings, some very few accounts have the Mongolian Death Worm accessorized with "wings" on one end. The Worm's coloring is typically reported as being dark red, brown, or even grey, occasionally with darker red or brown splotches.
Some witnesses have reported that the Mongolian Death Worm is annulated, or ringed, along the length of its body while others report that it is scaled like a lizard. Its movement has been described as slithering snake-like, wriggling worm-like, or crawling caterpillar-like.
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range/habitat
The Gobi Desert is ranked fourth in size among the world's deserts. It occupies roughly 500 thousand square miles (1.23 million square kilometers) covering a great deal of Mongolia, as well as parts of Inner Mongolia (in China). The Gobi desert is more often cold than it is hot. It is still an arid place. Regardless of the true nature of the Mongolian Death Worm, whether worm, amphibian, or reptile, it displays the curious behavior of coming to the desert surface during the two hottest months of the Mongolian year, June and July. The worm also is seen more often following a heavy rain.
As noted earlier, the Mongolian Death Worm inhabits a range across the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, but tales and reports focus the Mongolian Death Worm in the southern portion of Mongolia near the border between Mongolia and China. This political boundary has been a deterrent to several expedition groups from closely researching this cryptid in the past. While Mongolia is far more open to tourism than in previous decades, China remains troublesome for cryptozoologists studying the Mongolian Death Worm.
Perhaps no stumble of Fate, the suspected habitat of the Mongolian Death Worm coincides with the water-retaining saxaul plant of the desert. This hardy shrub-tree grows in barren desert environs, withstanding heat and drought. The roots of a saxaul plant are said to be poisonous. The parasitic goyo plant which often lives off the saxaul is apparently not.
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history/origin
Stories of the Mongolian Death Worm date back for several centuries in the desert nomad culture. Stories began to appear in western scientific papers in the early nineteen hundreds. The bulk of collected reports occur between the 1940s and the 1960s with far less sightings now.
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timeline/major sightings
This is difficult to quantify, as so many reports are retold stories by people whose relatives or neighbors or friends of friends have seen a Mongolian Death Worm; however, major documented sightings and expeditions are listed in chronological order below:
Noyon, 1960s: A nature ranger claims a death worm killed an entire herd of camel when they trod upon it.
Nemeght,1967: A story from a herdsman is collected regarding a man and his horse both killed by a death worm after riding over it in the month of July.
June, 1990: Ivan Mackerle leads an unsuccessful expedition to the Gobi desert in search of the death worm.
June 1992: Ivan Mackerle leads another expedition to the Gobi desert and is again met with disappointment.
June 1996: A Czech research expedition, Olgoj Chorchoj Expedition fails to uncover any evidence, but does collect more reports of death worm sightings.
May 2005: Richard Freeman, Jon Hare Dr. Chris Clark, and Dave Churchill of the Centre for Fortean Zoology travel to the Gobi and collect many reports of recent sightings but do not return with any evidence.
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suspected hoaxes
Oddly enough, this is one cryptid that seems to be without imitators. The indigenous population are genuinely terrified of this creature, though as the twenty-first century dawns, this fear seems to be replaced with more enthusiasm to prove or disprove this creature's existence.
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proposed explanationsThe Mongolian Death Worm lends itself to a trove of possible scientific explanations, one among them is that this creature is exactly as described, a venom-spewing electrical sausage-worm of hitherto unknown existence.
Perhaps the most likely explanation for the Mongolian Death Worm is the
Tartar sand boa, Eryx tataricus. With its blunted head and tail, its thicker body, brown to grayish brown to reddish coloration, and its small eyes, the Tartar sand boa fits the general description of the Mongolian Death Worm very well. A very likely candidate for misidentification and the attachment of superstitious abilities such as venom-spitting and electrocution. The sand boa is not a venomous snake, but that's not to say a remarkably venomous sub-species has been overlooked, or that colloquial superstitions have not unfairly imbued the creature with venom it has never possessed. As for the ability to generate enough electricity to kill a human or other animal, that too may just be desert legend.
Another theory is that the Mongolian Death Worm is a variety of annelid which can tolerate a much drier environment than its wetter cousins found elsewhere. This explanation would explain the Mongolian Death Worm's movement and appearance, but not its girth, toxicity, or electricity. As these attributes can be witnessed in several other surprising places in taxonomy, they are more improbable than impossible.
That the Mongolian Death Worm may be a legless or simply small-legged lizard should not be discredited either. Some lizards so equipped appear to be snakes or even worms. Some have small inutile legs that appear to be nothing more than large scales. This could attribute to the Mongolian Death Worm having once been reported as having "wings".
It is entirely possible that the Mongolian Death Worm is all of these things at once. As a highly-feared denizen of the desert, the Mongolian Death Worm, or at least the highly deviant reports, may be different unexceptional creatures reported by various people seeing what they believe to be a death worm. Given the predominance of the Mongolian Death Worm myth, it's not hard to reason that nearly any creature roughly fitting the description would be misidentified and purported to be this deadly and feared animal. This would still not explain the very common reports not fitting any desert animal currently known to science, but it would help to narrow the cryptid's characteristics.
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