Spanning an area of 1,564,116 sq km, Mongolia is a land-locked country. What's known as Mongolia today is simply outer Mongolia, as inner Mongolia has been under China since years now. With over 30 percent of its population comprising of nomadic tribes and a large part of its land remains untouched, you can't but admit that there is a mysterious exotic air about it. Here are some fun historical facts about Mongolia that you probably did not know.

Genghis Khan burial site

 While you may already be aware that Delüün (or Deluun) Boldog is the birthplace of Genghis Khan, his burial place remains a secret to this day. In fact, according to legend, the attendees of his funeral were killed by soldiers so that no one outside learned about the burial site. The soldiers are also believed to have killed themselves to keep the secret completely guarded.

Mongolian script

Despite being illiterate, Genghis Khan commanded the introduction of Mongolian scripture, and it adopted from the Uyghurs script. In the 1930s, Mongolia also tried adopting Latin to only replace it with Cyrillic script in the following decade. Interestingly, the verb is present at the end of the sentence in the Mongolian script.

Express postal system

 Mongolia saw its first express postal service over 1000 years back. Back in the days of Kublai Khan's reign, urgent messages would be sent with the help of a horse, and a feather would be attached to the message if it was of urgency. The horse postal service soon came to be known by the name Yam and continued well into the mid 20th century. The Yam postal system had messengers delivering news, mail and intelligence reports from one station to the other. The number of stations slowly grew, and China alone had over 1400 stations.

Dinosaur fossils

The Gobi Desert is where one of the first instances of the discovery of dinosaur eggs was made by Roy Chapman Andrews. In fact, it was this incident that inspired Indiana Jones. Dinosaur fossils can be easily found in the desert to this day, and it is not uncommon for tourists to pocket them as souvenirs.The Silk Road: The Mongolian empire got a majority of its income from taking over the Silk Road. The Silk Road that ran a length of 4000 miles served as a channel for trade between Europe and Asia. Genghis Khan knew that it would be difficult to conquer and maintain it under the Mongolian rule, so he went on to destroy all settlements that were by the route. At the end of it, nearly all settlements were either pleading him for mercy or completely destructed, and the Mongolians had it under their reign over most of the 14th -15th centuries.