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A mysterious tusked animal depicted in South African rock art might portray an ancient species preserved as fossils in the same region, according to a study published September 18, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE 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 suggests the tusked creature might have been inspired by an extinct species.

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 10 years.

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