Artists take inspiration from many sources. For the San people of South Africa, the spark that inspired some of their rock paintings may have come from fossils of creatures that went extinct more than 200 million years ago.
A study in PLOS ONE says that not only did the San draw on bones of dicynodonts — large animals with downward-turning tusks that roamed the Earth before dinosaurs — but that they beat Western paleontologists to the punch.
The “winged serpent” panel depicts a creature with tusks akin to the dicynodont. That painting dates to 1835 at the latest — meaning that the San were familiar with dicynodont fossils at least 10 years before paleontologist Richard Owen identified and named the species in 1845.
The San probably knew about the dicynodonts long before that, though, because their mythology includes descriptions of the creatures. Tying dicynodont fossils to both San myths and ...
