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 first inhabitants of southern Africa knew about locally abundant dicynodont fossils and made rock art about them.

But Benoit, who works at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, has a different perspective. He says the animal resembles a dicynodont – a four-legged, toothless and tusked ancestor of today's mammals, whose fossils are abundant and conspicuous in the Karoo Basin.

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,

Indigenous painting may portray a long extinct creature that appeared before the first dinosaurs, a study found.

In the Karoo Basin of South Africa, an unusual tusked beast is painted on a rock wall. Archaeologists have previously pondered whether the artwork depicts a mythical creature from the realm of fantasy,