NEW YORK, NY.- On a sandstone cliff in South Africa, a series of paintings recount a riveting battle. Spears fly as shield-wielding warriors charge. Animals, including an aardvark and scores of antelope, fringe the fracas.

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

A paper published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One posits that this mythic monster was inspired by local fossils of long-extinct animals. The author of the study suggests that the Indigenous southern African people who painted the Horned Serpent panel, the San, developed paleontological knowledge about their region that predated the contemporary Western approach to studying creatures that disappeared millions of years ago.

Julien Benoit, the author of the study and a paleontologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, came across a description of the Horned Serpent rock art in a 1930 tome. The book’s illustration of the tusked creature intrigued him. “I immediately thought that this could be a dicynodont,” Benoit said.

Dicynodonts were burly reptilelike ancestors of mammals. These large herbivores had a turtlelike beak and a pair of tusks. They were among the few groups to survive the End-Permian mass extinction around 250 million years ago and make it into the Triassic Period, where they lumbered alongside early dinosaurs. But they went extinct 200 million years ago, long before the earliest humans, let alone the San, could paint them.

To understand the Horned Serpent’s origins better, Benoit set out to find the original rock wall where it was painted in a mountainous area of central South Africa.

This region is part of the Karoo Basin, a geologic expanse that records a vast swath of Earth’s history. The 260-million-year-old layer is littered with fossils from the Permian period.

Once he located the Horned Serpent panel, Benoit spent a day surveying the vicinity of the rock art and found several notable fossil fragments. It seemed that dicynodont specimens were not difficult to find in the area. More complete fossils of the animals, including a skull and a mummified foot covered in warty skin, have also been found in the region in the past.

According to Benoit, the abundant dicynodont remains in the region make it possible that these long-extinct animals inspired the San’s depiction of the creature on the Horned Serpent panel. In addition to the telltale tusks, the creature’s back is curved into a U shape, which is reminiscent of the contorted “death pose” of many fossilized skeletons in the area. The creature’s dotted hide may also be a nod to the bumpy skin preserved on some fossils.

This would make the creature on the Horned Serpent panel the earliest 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 science historian at Stanford University who studies traditional interpretations of fossils, the San are well known for their knowledge of both living and extinct animals.

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

A noteworthy example is Mokhali Cave in Lesotho, where San artists depicted three-toed footprints and a birdlike creature most likely inspired by nearby dinosaur fossils. These paintings are “way ahead of their time in terms of scientific accuracy compared to the reconstructions of heavy, sluggish dinosaurs made later by the first Western scientists,” Benoit said.

Kenneth Angielczyk, a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago who does field work in South Africa and was not involved in the new paper, thinks that it is difficult to say for certain whether the rock art depicts a dicynodont. But he agrees that the San probably found inspiration in the region’s fossils.

“As someone who loves dicynodonts,” Angielczyk said, “I think it would be wonderful if people in the past noticed them in some way and incorporated them into their worldview.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.