A fossilized creature may explain a puzzling drawing on a rock wall.

On a sandstone cliff in South Africa, a series of paintings depict a dramatic battle. Spears fly as shield-bearing warriors charge. Animals, including an anteater and dozens of antelopes, swarm the battlefield.

This dramatic rock art, known as the Horned Serpent Painting, is estimated to be more than 200 years old. In addition to the wildlife known to the area, it also features a Seussian creature with the elongated body of a lizard and the tusked face of a seahorse. Its skin is covered in polka dots. This bizarre beast is unlike anything found in South Africa in recent centuries. What could it be?

A research paper published Wednesday in the journal Plus One The mythical beast is believed to have been inspired by local fossils of long-extinct animals. The study’s author suggests that the indigenous South African people who painted the horned serpent, the San, developed a paleontological knowledge of their region that predated the modern Western approach to studying creatures that disappeared millions of years ago.

Julien Benoit, study author and paleontologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, found a rock art description of the horned serpent in Volume 1930The book’s illustrations of the fanged creature intrigued him. “I immediately thought this might be a dicynodont,” Dr. Benoit said.

Dicynodonts were huge, reptilian ancestors of mammals. These huge herbivores had a turtle-like beak and a pair of fangs. They were among the few groups to survive the Permian mass extinction about 250 million years ago and made it into the Triassic, where they lived alongside early dinosaurs. But they went extinct 200 million years ago, long before early humans, let alone the San, could draw them.

To better understand the origins of the horned serpent, Dr. Benoit set out to find the original rock wall where it was painted in a mountainous area of ​​central South Africa.

This area is part of the Karoo Basin, a geological expanse that records a vast swath of Earth’s history. This 260-million-year-old layer is filled with fossils dating back to the Permian period.

Once the horned serpent painting was located, Dr. Benoit spent a day surveying the area around the rock art and found several noteworthy fossil fragments. It seems that finding dicynodont specimens in the area was not difficult. More complete animal fossils have been found in the area in the past, including a skull and a mummified foot covered in warty skin.

According to Dr. Benoit, the abundant remains of dicynodonts in the area make it possible that these long-extinct animals were the inspiration for the San depiction of the creature in the Horned Serpent painting. In addition to the distinctive fangs, the creature’s back is curved into a U-shape, reminiscent of the contorted “death pose” of many fossilized skeletons in the region. The creature’s speckled skin may also be a reference to the ridged skin preserved in some fossils.

This would make the creature on the Horned Serpent painting the oldest known depiction of a dicynodont. The rock art was painted sometime before 1835, making it at least a decade older than the first description of a dicynodont by Western scientists.

According to Adrienne Mayor, a historian of science at Stanford University who studies traditional interpretations of fossils, the San are known for their knowledge of living and extinct animals.

“They are known to have a strong curiosity about the environment and to incorporate fossils and extinct animals into their rock art,” said Dr. Mayor, who was not involved in the new study.

A notable example is the Mokhali Cave in Lesotho, where San artists depicted three-toed footprints and a bird-like creature, likely inspired by nearby dinosaur fossils. These paintings, says Dr Benoit, “were far ahead of their time in terms of scientific accuracy compared to the slow, heavy dinosaur reconstructions made by early Western scientists later on.”

Kenneth Angelsick, a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago who conducts fieldwork in South Africa and was not involved in the new research, says it’s hard to say for sure whether the rock paintings depict dicynodonts. But he agrees that the San people may have found inspiration in fossils in the area.

“As someone who loves dicynodonts, I think it would be great if people in the past had somehow noticed their existence and incorporated them into their view of the world,” Dr. Angelsik said.