Uploaded September 2018 | Updated September 2026, 5 minutes ago

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From lost Egyptian cities to treasures beyond your belief these are the 10 most amazing desert discoveries

5. Dinosaur Footprint
It's been about 66 million years since dinosaurs roamed the earth, but new discoveries keep cropping up shining more light into the ancient gigantic creatures. Okayama University scientists discovered an enormous dinosaur footprint in Mongolia's Gobi desert believed to have belonged to a Titanosaur in 2016. It measured over 3 feet long and its estimated to date back to 70 million years ago. Such discoveries are always exciting to scientists because they provide an opportunity to learn more about massive creatures.
The footprint was also astonishingly well-preserved and its three claw marks were visibly clear. The Titanosaur were herbivores with long necks and they were an estimated 65 feet tall and measured about 98 feet head to tail. They lived during the Cretaceous period and weighed about 70 tonnes.
4. Purple Eggs
In 2013 Tucson residents Geraldine Vargas and her husband were taking a walk in the desert when they happened upon a puzzling pool of what seemed like thousands of purple eggs. The pools of purple eggs were completely isolated and seemed to glisten against the sun. They were also watery, translucent, and spherical in shape. Vargas explained that they emailed a zoologist friend the photos of the eggs they took and she didn't know what they were.
Tucson Botanical Gardens director of marketing Darlene Buhrow explained that if the eggs were naturally occurring they could belong to a jelly fungus or slime mold. There have been suggestions that they could be Deco Beads that are often used to keep plants hydrated. However, that still doesn't explain how thousands of them ended up in the desert.
3. Killer Whale Geoglyph
Last year(2017) in November, archaeologists discovered an enormous geoglyph depicting a killer whale etched on the hillside of a Peruvian desert. The 230-foot-long geoglyph found in the Palpa region in southern Peru is estimated to date back to 2,000 years ago. It's the figure of an orca which was considered semi mythical, powerful creatures in ancient Peruvian lore. Researchers also believe that it could be one of the Palpa region's oldest geoglyphs, and it's even older than the nearby Nazca Lines.
The orca geoglyph had actually been documented in the 1960s through photographs taken by German archaeologists. The photographs were printed in the 70s, but the location of the orca geoglyph hadn't been well-described. Archaeologist Johny Isla remembered seeing the photograph when researching geoglyphs. Isla returned to Peru and searched for it making the rediscovery in January 2015, which was 50 years after its first discovery.
2. Ancient Jellyfish Graveyard
540 million years ago, walking by the seaside would create imprints of your footprints and leave them perfectly preserved for future generations to find. That's exactly what happened to the jellyfish that died by the now arid Death Valley. The sand contained microbial communities that created a gooey-like glue that perfectly preserved impressions. Some of the impressions found are believed to belong to the oldest known jellyfish stranding from the Cambrian period. Scientists found the ancient jellyfish well-preserved within a southeastern Californian slab of sandstone.
They managed to identify 13 of the oval specimens, and the fossils were identifiable based on their lighter weight than the surrounding rock. The jellyfish fossils also varied in size ranging from 1.2 to 8.3 inches as well as their preservation style. Some of the jellyfish specimens still had some of their body parts faintly visible. They are also helping scientists investigate the Ediacaran biota, which was a group of bizarre marine organisms that appeared and abruptly disappeared 575 million years ago.
1. Namibian Shipwreck Gold
In 2016, miners working for the diamond company De Beers stumbled upon a 500-year-old shipwreck confirmed to be the Bom Jesus in the Namibian desert. Much like you'd expect from a great shipwreck, it was filled with treasure and in this case, it was real gold worth an estimated $11.6 million. The Bom Jesus disappeared in 1533 after setting sail from Lisbon on its way to India. The diggers uncovered the ship in a drained lagoon's pit and immediately called in geological experts.
The excavation revealed navigational tools and bones as well as pottery and the big find which was the Spanish gold coins. Manchester University's Professor Timothy Insoll explained that the religious artifacts and clothing could prove more valuable because they give a better insight into the past. The exciting aspect about the shipwreck, other than the gold, is the fact that most of the items survived 500 years at the bottom of the sea while in reality, they should have disintegrated. The Portuguese government waived the right to the gold allowing Namibia to keep it.