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Bard cautioned, however, that although she has seen yardangs at the Dakhla Oasis in Egypt's Western Desert, she has never seen a yardang that looks like the one the team produced in their study.

Even if a sphinx-shaped yardang existed at Giza, the Egyptians would have "had to add onto the natural formation with limestone blocks to complete the front part/lion legs & paws," Bard told Live Science in an email.

Laura Ranieri Roy, an Egyptologist and the founder-director of Ancient Egypt Alive, noted that fieldwork carried out in the 1930s by the archaeologist Émile Baraize suggested that the Sphinx was actually built on two yardangs located close together, with the rear of the Sphinx built atop one yardang and the head and chest of the Sphinx atop another.

My Chinese guide and I were standing in the Yardang National Geopark, on the border between Gansu Province and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in China’s extreme northwest.

A CAS researcher atop the Yardang landform of Jili Lake in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China.Credit: