Painting of the dicynodont made by the San in the early 1800s. Credit: Julien Benoit, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

New research compares 1800s South African rock art painting of tusked animal by San people to local fossils of long-extinct species.

A mysterious tusked animal depicted in South African rock art might portray an ancient species preserved as fossils in the same region, according to new research by Julien Benoit of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

The Horned Serpent panel is a section of rock wall featuring artwork of animals and other cultural elements associated with the San people of South Africa, originally painted between 1821 and 1835.

Among the painted figures is a long-bodied animal with downward-turned tusks which doesn’t match any known modern species in the area.

As the San people are known to have included various aspects of their surroundings into art, including fossils, Benoit suggested the tusked creature might have been inspired by an extinct species.

The Horned Serpent panel. A, general view of the Horned Serpent panel photographed in 2024 by the author. B, close up of the section figured in Stow and Bleek’s plate 39. C, close up of the tusked animal. D, close up of the warriors painted below the Horned Serpent panel. E, close up of the warriors painted to the right of the panel. Credit: Julien Benoit, 2024, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Well-preserved

The Karoo Basin of South Africa is famous for abundant well-preserved fossils, including tusked animals called dicynodonts, which are often found eroding out of the ground.

Benoit revisited the Horned Serpent panel and found the tusked figure comparable with dicynodont fossils, an interpretation that is also supported by San myths of large animals that once roamed the region but are now extinct.

If the tusked figure is in fact an artistic interpretation of a dicynodont, a species which went extinct before dinosaurs appeared and were long extinct when humans appeared in Africa, it would predate the first scientific description of these ancient animals by at least ten years.

There is archaeological evidence that the San people might have collected fossils and incorporated them into their artwork, but the extent of indigenous knowledge of palaeontology is poorly understood across Africa.

Further research into indigenous cultures might shed more light on how humans around the world have incorporated fossils into their culture.

Benoit said: “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.

“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.”

The study is published in PLOS ONE.