Top 10 Craziest Things Found in the Desert

Located west of Marree, South Australia is a large geoglyph known as the Maree Man. The figure depicts an indigenous man holding a stick or a boomerang, similar in pose to the Artemision Zeus sculpture. The geoglyph is 1.7 miles tall, with lines 12 inches deep and 115 feet wide. It’s located on the plateau of Finnis Springs, and absolutely no one knows how it got there. It was discovered by a charter pilot on June 26, 1998, and satellite images prove that it was made between May 27 and June 12 of that year. Most people believe that it was created by local artist Bardius Goldberg, but nothing has ever been proven.

In the early 2000s, fossilized bones of unusual horned kangaroos were unearthed from Australia’s Nullarbor Plain by the Western Australia Museum. The discovery initially confused Dr. Gavin Prideaux and his team of paleontologists, although they later discovered that the “horns” were actually prominent brow ridges. They also found that the kangaroos had long claws and theorized that the eye ridges were used to protect the kangaroos’ eyes as they were burrowing and wading through spiky bush. While that’s not quite as exciting as actual horns, the unique kangaroos still made for a new discovery, and Prideaux stated that the ridges “are very weird features about a skull or skeleton.”

“E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” is widely regarded as the worst video game ever made, and it’s become an important piece of gaming culture. Gaming legend states that vast quantities of unsold copies were buried in a New Mexico landfill, but this was never officially proven - until April 26, 2014. Fuel Industries was given access to the Alamogordo dump site to film a documentary titled “Atari: Game Over.” On hand was Atari manager James Heller, who claims to have buried 728,000 cartridges. It wasn’t long before they struck gaming gold, and over 1,000 cartridges of various games were successfully excavated. A copy of “E.T.” was given over to the Smithsonian for its historical importance within gaming history.

These Biblical sounding structures are ancient geoglyphs found throughout the deserts spanning from Syria to Saudi Arabia. These geoglyphs were first discovered by an RAF flight lieutenant named Percy Maitland in 1927 as he was flying airmail over Jordan. However, T.E. Lawrence made note of “long and puzzling walls” found in the Negev desert in 1913, although he failed to realize their historical significance. These structures are built from stone, take on many different shapes and sizes, and may be up to 5,000 years old. Most are believed to be desert kites, which was a system used by ancient desert civilizations to herd and trap wild game like ungulates and gazelle.

There’s something weirdly poetic about a whale graveyard located next to a desert highway. Well, that’s exactly what you get with Cerro Ballena, which is near the Pan-American Highway in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Situated north of Caldera, the site contains the bones of ten different marine vertebrates, including seals, aquatic sloths, and up to forty baleen whales. It is the densest collection of whale fossils in the entire world and was found during a road expansion project in 2010. The site is estimated to be 6-9 million years old, and it’s believed that the animals died from toxic algal blooms and were washed into a mudflat before they were buried by sand.

Someone call Indiana Jones, because we have a case for him. Namibian diamond miners found the remains of an old sailing ship while draining a lagoon. Inside the relic were human bones, navigational tools, valuable pottery, and thousands of gold coins. Archaeologists confirmed that the wreckage was that of the Bom Jesus, a Portuguese ship that was lost in 1533. The ship was in such remarkable condition owing to the copper ingots, which deterred insects and organisms responsible for decay. And don’t get too excited - the gold coins were handed over to the Namibian government after Portugal waived their right to the claim.

Located in Saqqara’s Catacombs of Anubis is a mass grave filled with eight million mummified animals. A large majority of the animals are dogs, as dogs were closely linked to the Ancient Egyptian God of Death, Anubis. Project director Paul Nicholson claims that killing and mummifying dogs was a religious act, as the dogs supposedly interacted with Anubis to bring good fortune to the recently deceased. Nicholson and his team estimated that there were up to eight million animals interred within the catacombs, many of them small dogs that were bred specifically for the purpose.

Fairy circles are creepy little circles of barren land located within an arid grassland. The result is a sea of grass blotched by infertile circles of land spanning 7 and 49 feet in diameter. Most of them are located in the Namib desert, although some have recently been found in the Pilbara of Western Australia. The Himba people of northern Namibia attribute the patches to gods and spirits, but the truth is far more mundane - if equally fascinating. The main contending theory posits that the grass organizes itself in this pattern to catch water within the barren circles, loosen the soil, and feed the nearby vegetation. Life, uh, finds a way. Even in the middle of the Namibian desert.

Also known as the Qumran Caves Scrolls, these are a large collection of ancient Jewish religious manuscripts dated between 408 BC to 318 AD. The Qumran Caves contained thousands of parchment and papyrus fragments, most of which fall into three groups. 40% are texts from Hebrew Scripture, 30% are texts not canonized within the Hebrew Bible, and roughly 30% pertain to the rules and beliefs of various sects within Judaism. They were first discovered by Bedouin shepherds, who found seven scrolls contained within jars in a local cave. Further scrolls were unearthed within the caves near the West Bank’s Dead Sea throughout a ten year period between 1946 and 1956.

Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions.

Mysterious Patterns
Bizarre Patterns Were Found in China’s Gobi Desert

Ancient Boat
Czech Archaeologists Unearthed a 4,500-Year-Old Boat

Giant Concrete Arrows
Arrows Were Littered Throughout America to Aid Pilots

Tunisian Lake
A Mysterious Lake Appeared in the Tunisian Desert

When it comes to geoglyphs, none are as popular as the Nazca Lines. These desert depressions were created between 500 BC and 500 AD in Peru’s Nazca Desert and were fabricated by removing the surface pebbles and revealing the yellow-grey subsoil beneath. They were first noted in 1553 when conquistador Pedro Cieza de León mistook them for trail markers. The lines and figures cover nineteen square miles of desert, and most measure between 0.2 and 0.7 miles across. The designs vary and include shapes of spiders, humans, flowers, and monkeys, among many others. The exact reason for their being remains uncertain, although most experts agree that they have religious significance to the ancient Nazca culture.