Remarkable 200-Year-Old Rock Painting May Depict a Strange Animal That Went Extinct 250 Million Years Ago

Between 1821 and 1835, the San people of South Africa painted an exhilarating battle scene on a sandstone cliff called the Horned Serpent panel. Among the depicted warriors, spears and recognizable animals is a mysterious addition: a tusked creature with a long, curved body and polka-dotted skin that doesn’t resemble any living species.

Now, paleontologist Julien Benoit has suggested that the Horned Serpent might depict the long-extinct dicynodont. His study was published in the journal PLOS ONE on Wednesday.

“I came across the Stow and Bleek book about San rock art and when I saw their beautiful reproduction of that tusked animal, I immediately thought that this could well be a dicynodont,” Benoit, of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa, tells Newsweek’s Aristos Georgiou. “I needed to see the real one with my own eyes. The original painting, when I found it, did not disappoint!”

Dicynodonts were ancestors of mammals, but they appeared more like reptiles and sported beaks and tusks. They walked the Earth with the earliest dinosaurs and went extinct around 200 million years ago. Needless to say, they were gone long before the San people—or any human, for that matter—could have caught a glimpse of them.

However, south-central Africa’s Karoo Basin is famous for its abundance of well-preserved fossils, including those of the dicynodont, per a statement. Benoit argues that since the San people are known to depict elements of their surrounding environment in their art, their Horned Serpent might have been inspired by fossil remains of the dicynodont. The painted creature certainly has tusks, and its polka-dots may be in reference to the animal’s bumpy skin, which was preserved on some fossils, per the New York Times’ Jack Tamisiea.

This suggestion is further supported by previous discoveries of San tools in outcrop areas with dicynodont fossils in the vicinity of the Horned Serpent panel, Bruce Bower reports for Science News. If Benoit’s conclusion is proven true, it could have important implications for the history of the creature’s scientific discovery.

“The painting was made in 1835 at the latest, which means this dicynodont was depicted at least ten years before the Western scientific discovery and naming of the first dicynodont by Richard Owen in 1845,” Benoit explains in the statement. “This work supports that the first inhabitants of southern Africa, the San hunter-gatherers, discovered fossils, interpreted them and integrated them in their rock art and belief system.”

In other words, the Indigenous people of southern Africa might have had paleontological knowledge of their lands before Westerners did. Adrienne Mayor, a science historian at Stanford University who was not involved in the study, tells the New York Times that the San people are known to have strong knowledge of both modern and prehistoric animals, which they incorporated into their understanding of the world.

In fact, San myths recall large creatures that once roamed southern Africa before disappearing, and the dicynodont might have been purposely depicted as part of a cultural ceremony because it was extinct, Benoit tells IFL Science’s Tom Hale.

“During rain-making ceremonies, the San enter a state of trance and enter the realm of the dead to catch rain-animals and bring the rain back to the world of the living,” he adds. “By picking a species such as a dicynodont, that they knew was extinct and thus dead, they likely hoped this rain-animal had some increased potency to bridge the two worlds.”

Benoit tells Newsweek that he can rule out “pure imagination” as a source of the artwork, because the San did not paint imaginary things. And while Benoit’s interpretation remains speculative, Kenneth Angielczyk, a paleobiologist at the Field Museum in Chicago who was not involved in the study, likes the idea.

“As someone who loves dicynodonts,” he tells the New York Times, “I think it would be wonderful if people in the past noticed them in some way and incorporated them into their worldview.”

Margherita Bassi | READ MORE

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.