Please excuse me if you already wrote about this.
One feature of death in a sandy desert is that bodies dis-articulate.
This was not widely known or understood before World War II, when numerous pilots and soldiers were lost in the Sahara Desert.
First, the motion of the sand is abrasive and removes all the soft tissue from a dead body within a couple years.
Second, the skeleton is pulled apart (dis-articulated) and scattered, in all directions, once again by the motion of the sand.
First encounters with this scenario in areas where there were no carnivorous predators were a shocking mystery to many European and North American army units.
A similar effect is seen among those who die on Everest — dessication, loss of tissue, wind damage.