Curious places in Mongolia

These tiny rodents have hind legs four times longer than their front legs and can jump 10 feet in a single bound. 25 times their body length. They never drink water, getting all moisture from seeds, and look like miniature kangaroos with rabbit ears.

In 1948, Soviet paleontologists found meter-long claws in the Gobi Desert and assumed they belonged to a giant turtle. Decades later, those claws turned out to be the hands of Therizinosaurus, a theropod dinosaur closely related to Velociraptor that had somehow evolved into a giant herbivore with the hips of a plant-eater, the claws of a ground sloth, the neck of a sauropod, and a beak. It looked like someone had assembled a dinosaur from spare parts.

Forests of saxaul trees in extreme continental desert support unique mammals including Przewalski's horses. The trees survive on groundwater and create the only shade for hundreds of kilometers.