“I have not told half of the things I saw, because otherwise, no one would have believed me“: this is how the intrepid Italian explorer Marco Polo admitted some time after his return home at the end of the long journey that had brought him to China and Mongolia, at the time united in one huge empire.

Too strange, too exotic to be believed by a world that based its solid truths on other philosophical and environmental pillars. Yet the words of the Venetian explorer could easily be considered valid even today, given that most of the wonders of Mongolia are essentially unknown to most, and therefore, if revealed, surprising.

The Gobi desert, for example. It is one of the most mysterious and desolate places on the planet, but not one of the least fascinating for this, on the contrary.

Its extension, for us accustomed to rather small dimensions, seems unlikely: one million 300 thousand square kilometers (like Spain, France and Germany put together) of almost nothing, distributed along 1300 kilometers in length and 700 in width. Incredible dimensions, for a territory that hosts only a few urban agglomerations, mainly due to the particularly extreme environmental conditions, given that the temperature range during the year manages to be equal to almost 100 degrees, among the most 50 of the hottest summers and minus 50 of the coldest winters.

It is not a question, as many think by making a natural mental association with the best-known deserts, of an immense expanse of sand, but of rocks, where tribes of nomadic shepherds live in tents that are fortunately well structured today, but who continue to rely on proven animals such as camels.

Yet, despite the desolation of a landscape that for this alone deserves to be admired at least once in a lifetime, the Gobi desert hides priceless treasures, one above all the real Jurassic Park: perhaps not everyone knows that the idea for shooting a film about the hypothetical cloning of a dinosaur came to Spielberg after learning that velociraptor eggs complete with embryos had been found in the Gobi and that the idea for the creation of the Indiana Jones character was offered by researcher Roy Chapman Andrews, author of sensational fossil discoveries right among the rocks of the Mongolian desert.

On the other hand, perhaps the most famous find in the world comes from the Gobi desert, that of the skeletons of two animals, a velociraptor and a protoceratops, eternalized forever in their deadly duel by a sudden landslide that covered and preserved them. up to the present day.

Thousands are the traces of life on our planet millions and millions of years ago that the ideal atmosphere of the Gobi allowed keeping legible even today and thousands are the skeletons from the Gobi that fill the display cases of museums around the world.

It is useless to look for them in Ulaanbaatar, where only a few crumbs of this immense paleontological heritage remain, even if considering the integral skeleton of a twelve-meter high tarbosaurus as crumbs are not entirely correct.

However, it is better to hike in the desert, perhaps leaning on some organization, to experience the emotion of a time machine that only that land can unleash.