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.