An eerie other world

This chorus of phantoms' howls strips these stones' skin, leaving only the land's bare skeleton.

The headstones of this geological graveyard arose 130 million years ago, after clouds carried away the last drop of a vast lake. Evaporation left the sedimentary deposits of the parched lakebed exposed to the explosive airstreams that slice through this desert terrain.

The other stone bones that sleep here belong to Jurassic and Cretaceous creatures. Their discovery early last century led to petrochemical development in Karamay, whose name translates from Uygur as Black Oil.

This prehistoric legacy lingers in the Dinosaur Valley.

Replicas of prehistoric beasts, eggs and skeletons animate the land above, while their actual remains slumber below-ground. Videos about these long-lost creatures are projected on the canyon's walls at night, when light shows cast technicolor on all of Ghost City's yardangs.

But at any hour of any era, the most vivid projection on this topography is the human quest for meaning. These formations evoke pareidolia, our predilection to detect familiar shapes in accidental patterns.

The yardangs function like an inkblot test on sandstone, compelling us to project our psychology onto geology. The winds gave them shape. Our minds gave their shapes identity.

This matrix of erosion and cognition has deciphered a roaring lion, a strutting peacock, a soaring eagle, a leaping warhorse, a lazing pig, and a scurrying raccoon. A whole zoo's worth of creatures rendered in rock is displayed in these badlands.

The same imaginations that hear specters in the wind see a pair of sea lions gazing at the moon, a Mongolian general, a dinosaur claw scratching the sky, and the RMS Titanic — some even claim they can hear the ill-fated ship's foghorn blowing in the wind.