Life restoration of Dicynodon lacerticeps, a dicynodont from the Late Permian, South
Africa (© ДиБгд-Wikipedia – CC BY 4.0 licence)
A farm named La Belle France, situated
at Brackfontein Ridge in the Karoo region of South Africa's Free State
Province, has long been known for the exquisite cave paintings on the wall of a
cave in its grounds – and especially for one particular painting dubbed the
Horned Serpent, which bears no resemblance to any known animal alive today. Its
curved, elongate, spotted body has four paddle-like limbs and a small head but
bearing a pair of very large downward-curving tusks, giving it a resemblance to
the head of a walrus (it has actually been dubbed a jungle walrus in cryptozoological writings after its similarity to a jungle-inhabiting African mystery beast reported by an explorer). But there have never been walruses in this area, ever. So
unless it is simply wholly imaginary, a spirit beast, what could this depicted
creature represent?
Cryptozoologists have speculated
whether it may have been some form of aquatic sabre-tooth tiger, an idea dating
back at least as far as Bernard Heuvelmans's writings in his 1978 book Les Derniers Dragons d'Afrique, and which
I have already documented in detail here on ShukerNature.
The 'Horned Serpent' petroglyph (public domain)
However, a wholly new and very convincing
identity has now been proposed, in a thought-provoking PLoS ONE paper authored by Dr Julien Benoit, from the Evolutionary
Studies Institute and School of Geosciences, at the University of the
Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg (click here to access it, and here to access a popular-format article
regarding it in The Conversation). The cave paintings were produced by the San
people, formerly known as the Bushmen of the East, indigenous hunter-gatherers
who no longer inhabit this particular region, but were well aware of the
wildlife around them and were accomplished artists, portraying such creatures
in their cave paintings. The San left this area in 1835, which therefore means
that this is the latest date by which the Horned Serpent painting could have
been produced by them. However, it may have been made much earlier, because the
San had lived here for thousands of years, and in this very same area are countless
fossils that may well provide the answer to the mystery of the Horned Serpent's
zoological identity, as Benoit has proposed.
The fossils are mostly of ancient
reptiles known as dicynodonts, which became extinct here around 250 million
years ago, during the Upper Permian Period. The principal species is Dicynodon
lacerticeps, averaging 4 ft in total length, whose squat body and four
fairly stout limbs render it relatively undistinguished in appearance – except,
that is, for its single pair of very sizeable, downward-curving, tusk-like
teeth. Benoit had previously discovered that the San people inhabiting Lesotho,
which neighbours South Africa's Free State, had incorporated depictions of
fossil dinosaur footprints into their cave paintings there, so he has now
proposed that the South African Karoo's Horned Serpent was their attempt to
reconstruct, like veritable proto-palaeontologists, the appearance in life of
the long-extinct dicynodonts, because its tusked head does bear a distinct
resemblance to fossil dicynodont skulls and teeth present in this same area.
A fossil Dicynodon
skull (© Ghedoghedo/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 3.0 licence)
Put another way, it is certainly a most notable coincidence that
a mysterious tusked beast should be depicted by indigenous artists in the same
region where fossil skulls and teeth of a distinctively tusked species are commonly
found. But that is not all. To quote Benoit:
The body of the tusked animal
from La Belle France [Horned Serpent], as painted by the San, is strangely
flexed like a banana, a pose that is commonly encountered on fossil skeletons
and is called the "death pose" by palaeontologists. Its body is also covered
with spots, not unlike the mummified
dicynodonts found in the area whose skin is
covered with bumps.
It seems likely, therefore, that the longstanding
mystery concerning what the Horned Serpent cave painting represents, and whose
existence was first brought to widespread attention almost a century ago, in
1930, is now finally solved - or is it? The Horned Serpent petroglyph seen in situ, alongside petroglyphs of certain other mysterious, unidentifiable creatures (public domain)For the Horned Serpent is not the only mysterious, ostensibly unidentified beast portrayed in this series of petroglyphs - in fact, there are several others depicted alongside it, all of which remain resolutely unexplained by the dicynodont identification.This leads me to wonder whether these illustrated mystery beasts are nothing more than wholly fabulous creatures of the imagination - San equivalents to Western unicorns, centaurs, dragons, and the like, perhaps?
Two of the nowadays
palaeontologically-inaccurate but still historically-significant life-sized dicynodont
sculptures created during the early 1850s by English sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse
Hawkins for display at southeast London's Crystal Palace Park and which, along with
many other sculptures of prehistoric fauna prepared by him, can still be seen today
at Dinosaur Court in Crystal Palace Park (© Ben Sutherland/Wikipedia – CC BY 2.0 licence) NB - an extensive documentation of their history and also that of the cryptozoological jungle walrus linked to the Horned Serpent petroglyph can be found in my book
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Full wraparpund cover of my book
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