On a sandstone cliff in South Africa, a series of paintings recount a riveting battle. Spears fly as warriors charge. Animals, including an aardvark and scores of antelope, fringe the fracas.
This rock art, known as the Horned Serpent panel, is estimated to be more than 200 years old. In addition to the region’s well-known wildlife, it also features a creature with the elongated body of a lizard and the tusked mug of a walrus. Its skin is covered in polka dots. This bizarre beast is unlike anything found in South Africa over recent centuries. What could it be?
A paper in the journal PLOS One posits that this mythic monster was inspired by local fossils of long-extinct animals. The study’s author suggests that the Indigenous southern African people who painted the Horned Serpent panel, the San, developed paleontological knowledge about their region that predated the contemporary Western approach to studying creatures that disappeared millions of years ago.
Julien Benoit, the author of the study and a paleontologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, came across a description of the Horned Serpent rock art in a 1930 tome.
Dicynodonts were burly reptilelike ancestors of mammals that were among the few groups to survive the End-Permian mass extinction 250 million years ago. But they went extinct 200 million years ago, long before the earliest humans, let alone the San, could paint them. To understand the Horned Serpent’s origins better, Benoit set out to find the original rock wall where it was painted in a mountainous area of central South Africa.
Benoit spent a day surveying the vicinity of the rock art. It seemed that dicynodont specimens were not difficult to find in the area. He said the abundant dicynodont remains in the region made it possible that these long-extinct animals inspired the San’s depiction of the creature on the Horned Serpent panel. In addition to the telltale tusks, the creature’s back is curved into a U-shape, which is reminiscent of the contorted “death pose” of many fossilized skeletons in the area. — JACK TAMISIEA/NYT
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