Everywhere I go I am 'Aloy of the Nora'

Did Jon look a bit disgruntled and foreboding today? It was probably just your imagination. There was no reason for him to be out of sorts; he hadn't had any visitors this weekend.

"I hope you all had a good weekend," he began. "Today we'll be talking about the Mongolian Death Worm." He brought up a picture. "Or in the local language, 'olgoi-khorkhoi'.It is alleged to exist in the Gobi desert. It was first described to the wider world by an American archaeologist in 1926 after he got the stories from the Mongolian people. None of the ones he spoke to had ever seen it, though; there were only second- and third-hand stories. In 1983, some locals were shown a Tartar sand boa and confirmed that was the creature, but other descriptions of it don't seem to match, so there's some question as to if it is that snake, or if it's another creature altogether. Descriptions from the 1926 tales say it was 'shaped like a sausage about two feet long', which might fit, but the worm is said to have no head, which the snake does, and to be 'so poisonous that merely to touch it means instant death', whereas the sand boa is both nonvenomous and nonpoisonous." And do not get him started on the difference!

"One later book describes the creature as travelling underground, detectable by the waves of sand it creates, and says that it can kill at a distance, by either spraying acid venom or creating an electrical discharge. However it should be noted that this description may owe much to an earlier fictional depiction of similar beasts which we won't go into because Ghanima. Several scientific expeditions have endeavored to find the animal, but with no results."

He shrugged. "So, the only question is if we believe it to be real or not. This one is actually not outside the bounds of terrestrial lifeforms, nor does anybody claim it to be supernatural or extraterrestrial for once. The only question is if we think a venomous, electrical worm - or snake, or legless lizard - exists or existed in the Gobi desert. And before anybody asks, you will not get extra credit for finding one. Just sunburn, probably."

He would absolutely be impressed and help you write a paper about it, but he didn't want to encourage that sort of thing.