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.
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.
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?
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?
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