Free Republic

A 200-year-old South African cave painting made by the region’s first inhabitants, the San people, appears to depict an animal that has been extinct for over 200 million years. A long-bodied animal with downward-turned tusks, the warm-blooded, lizard-like creature called a dicynodont (two-toothed dog) roamed the area before the first dinosaur appeared and died off at the end of the Triassic. If the artwork from the cave’s Horned Serpent panel at La Belle France (Free State Province, South Africa) is of this extinct species, its creation would predate the first known scientific classification of a dicynodont by at least a...

Art imitates life ... maybe.There’s something intriguing, even frightening, about the image of an ancient horned serpent roaming across the land. Thanks to some suggestive fossils and legends of old, talk of such a creature isn’t a new concept. But the recent discovery of 200-year-old rock paintings found in South Africa now has scientists hypothesizing that this ancient creature may have been far more than just a legend. The first formal scientific descriptions of this horned serpent—a supposed member of the dicynodont group—appeared in 1845. Considering the abundance of dicynodont fossils found in the Karoo Basin in South Africa, some...

Imagine if you crossed a rhino with a giant turtle and then supersized the result: You might get something like Lisowicia bojani, a newly discovered Triassic mammal cousin that had a body shaped like a rhinoceros, a beak like a turtle, and weighed as much as an African elephant, about 9 tons. Paleontologists say this startling creature offers a new view of the dawn of the age of the dinosaurs. "Who would have ever thought that there were giant, elephant-sized mammal cousins living alongside some of the very first dinosaurs?" marvels Stephen Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist at The University of...