This is the Best Evidence that Humans Lived with Dinosaurs

If Jurassic Park taught us anything, it’s that two books aren’t enough for a six-movie franchise, with a seventh on the way, and humans and dinosaurs should not be sharing the same planet at the same time. If modern humans have so much trouble handling the big lizards, I doubt our ancestors would’ve stood much of a chance. However, there are many who believe our ancestors not only managed to survive, they thrived, and if you know where to look, the body of evidence proving that dinosaurs and humans co-existed is impressive.

Before we get started, plesiosaurs and pterosaurs aren’t technically dinosaurs—they are airborne and sea-loving cousins—but if we get too pedantic about definitions, we won’t get past the introduction, so for this article, let’s just consider them part of the dinosaur clan. I also found some facts a bit hard to pin down, so my story might be slightly different from the one you know. With that out of the way, let’s see if I can convince anyone, including myself, that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time.

The Bible Said So

According to Young Earth Creationists—and we’ll be hearing about them quite a bit as they are the most vocal supporters of this theory—humans and dinosaurs totally walked the earth together, and all the proof you need can be found in the Bible. Just to make sure we don’t get sued: Creationists and Young Earth Creationists are two different groups within Christianity with different opinions. Both agree that God was the creator of all, but Young Earth Creationists are a little more literal in their interpretation of the Bible.

In the book of Genesis, we’re told that God created the earth and everything on it in seven days; Young Earth Creationists believe that means seven solar days, so seven 24-hour periods. No wonder He needed to rest for a day. Dinosaurs, being land animals, were created on day six, with plesiosaurs and pterosaurs created on day five. Of course, this means the earth is only a few thousand years old, not millions of years, so dinosaurs couldn’t have died out 65 million years ago.

The dinosaurs, Adam and Eve, and all other creatures great and small lived together peacefully in the Garden of Eden because, conveniently, all created creatures were herbivores. You see, there was no death—apparently, plant death doesn’t count. In Revelation, the Bible also says that in heaven the lion will lie with the lamb, not eat the lamb, so clearly lions were meant to eat yams, not lambs. This changed when Adam and Eve committed the first sin, and God cursed all of creation with death as punishment.

Bit of an over-reaction if you ask me. Overnight, the animals changed, some becoming meat-eaters with sharp claws and teeth, so it seems that sin ruins everything—even dinosaurs.

Cursing His creation with death apparently wasn’t enough; to really drive the point home, everyone was wiped out by a Great Flood. Luckily, Noah, being a good and dutiful servant, loaded two of every kind of dinosaur onto the ark along with all the other animals. Note I said kind, not species. Apparently, there are over 1,000 species of dinosaur, but there are only around 50 kinds of dinosaur. No, I don’t understand the reasoning either. Noah was also clever—instead of taking adults past their prime, he probably took juveniles or even eggs; they take up less space and you’ll have animals in peak condition to replenish the earth when it’s all over. Hand-rearing a bunch of baby dinosaurs would be a full-time job, but it’s not like Noah and his family had anywhere else to be. You’d think that a bunch of animals in close quarters would pose a few problems, but Noah was a righteous man, and in the presence of righteous men, even animals are at peace with each other, so luckily for the lambs, the lions were back to eating yams. The dinosaurs who didn’t make it onto the ark drowned and were buried in mud before scavengers could get to them, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we have fossils. After the whole Babel debacle, humans spread across the globe and, inevitably, ran into the descendants of the dinosaurs that survived on the ark. However, with a changing climate, loss of habitat and food, and humans hunting them for delicious dino steaks, dinosaurs eventually died out.

We know humans encountered dinosaurs after the flood because dinosaurs are described in the Bible, I kid you not. There are three creatures that could be dinosaurs. Firstly, we have the Tanniyn, which translates as serpent, sea monster, or, most commonly, dragon. It might’ve been some kind of large reptile living on land and in water, but we don’t know much more than that. Next up, we have the Leviathan, a large sea monster with scales and terrible teeth. It breathes smoke and spits fire, and cannot be killed by man; only God can slay this fearsome beast. To me this seems metaphorical, but I’m just a writer, not a Bible scholar.

The star of the show is the behemoth. In a spectacular example of selective reading, the behemoth is proudly presented as a detailed description of a dinosaur in the Old Testament book of Job. It eats grass, like an ox, has strong hips and powerful muscles, bones like beams of bronze, ribs like bars of iron, and a tail that moves like a cedar. Based on this description, this must be a dinosaur, most likely Apatosaurus, a long-necked dinosaur that could grow up to 23 meters, or 75 feet, tall. The Apatosaurus certainly had a tail like a cedar tree; however, the Bible doesn’t say anything about the tail looking like a cedar tree, only that it moved like a cedar, but this is of course unimportant. If you read the rest of the passage, it also says the behemoth can lie in the shade of a lotus tree and take cover in the reeds, which an Apatosaurus most certainly couldn’t do. Behemoth also had a very large mouth, while Apatosaurus had a fairly small mouth, but sure, the Bible is describing an Apatosaurus, not a hippo.

In fairness, most Christians view the Bible as a piece of literature concerned with the creation of man and his relationship with God, not a field manual listing every animal and insect species that ever crawled on the earth. The Christian Bible also isn’t the only religious scripture mentioning dragons. Hindu scriptures are filled with stories about dragons that some people interpret as dinosaurs. However, I’d prefer not to get karmically bitch-slapped by an eight-armed goddess, so let’s move on to something else.

Dinosaurs in Ancient Art

Now, I hear you ask, if dinosaurs didn’t live with humans, why do they keep showing up in ancient art? Surely the only way those ancient artists could’ve depicted dinosaurs is if they actually saw dinosaurs for themselves—it’s not like they had Google Images to work from. And we’re not talking about an odd painting here and a statue over there. The body of art that supposedly proves that humans and dinosaurs lived together could fill a large museum.

Much as I’d love to, I can’t cover all of them, so we’ll just look at a few examples and see if the truth can be found in art.

Cave Paintings and Petroglyphs

Pretty much immediately after crawling from the primordial muck and developing opposable thumbs, the first artist was hard at work, and the world was literally their canvas. Rock art has been found on the walls of caves and canyons everywhere there are caves and canyons. However, dinosaur cave art seems to be particularly popular in North America, especially Utah. The Kachina Bridge Apatosaurus is probably the best known, but it turned out to be just a snake and a mud stain, so no dinosaur there, but what about the Havasupai dinosaur?

Havasupai Dinosaur

In the autumn of 1924, Samuel Hubbard was back in the Havasupai region of the Grand Canyon. He’d been in the area twice before, in 1894 and 1895, and on one of these earlier expeditions, he had noticed some strange carvings on canyon walls that he really wanted to take another look at. The carvings and pictographs were mostly of recognizable animals, like an ibex and some serpents, as well as human-like figures and implements like shields and spears—fairly common themes with rock art; however, the dinosaur was a little unusual.

Hubbard was an evolutionist and scientist, not a creationist, so unlike many other “scientists” finding dinosaurs on canyon walls, he didn’t go looking for a dinosaur. The dinosaur found him. After studying the pictograph carefully, Hubbard concluded that the animal was pictured upright, balancing on its tail, suggesting that whoever drew it had seen a living dinosaur.

In 1924, paleontology was still a very new science, so Hubbard can be forgiven for thinking dinosaurs dragged their tails—we know better today. The images weren’t all made at the same time and probably not by the same person, but it seemed to suggest that the artists chose to depict things they knew and things they’d seen.

Hubbard was of the opinion that the dinosaur was reminiscent of the very extinct Diplodocus, a long-necked sauropod. However, later researchers felt that the dinosaur is more likely a depiction of a hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur. In a film and children’s book in the 1970s, the dinosaur was identified as an Edmontosaurus, with the picture of the petroglyph next to a picture of an actual Edmontosaurus in a very unnatural pose—we have to make sure the petroglyph fits the dinosaur after all. This proof seemed very cut and dry to most 5-year-olds, I’m sure. Not too far away from this carving, scientists also later found dinosaur tracks, so there were definitely dinosaurs living in the area. Of course, this doesn’t mean they lived at the same time, but this is a minor detail. Most experts believe that the image is actually a stylized bird, or perhaps the artist’s first attempt at a bird, but who knows—perhaps the ancient artists saw sauropods and immortalized the majestic creatures in their art.

Black Dragon Canyon Pterosaur

Pterosaurs also show up quite a lot in cave art. The Black Dragon Canyon Pterosaur in Emery County, Utah, is a pictogram of what could be a large monster with outstretched wings and possibly sharp teeth, so not your garden-variety eagle. The weird bird, later identified as a pterosaur, has one large deformed wing and another much smaller wing. I hope our bro had bus fare ‘cause he definitely wasn’t flying anywhere. Eventually, Young Earth Creationists claimed the pterosaur as proof and identified it as a Quetzalcoatlus northropi, a winged reptile with a 10-meter (32-foot) wingspan. Pterosaur fossils have been found in the region, so at least we know pterosaurs were whirring around the skies—but were they spotted and painted by an early artist? Scientists have since spoiled the fun by claiming the pictograph is simply five different images all grouped together by a man with a piece of white chalk and an active imagination. Pterosaur or five images grouped together? How long will this question haunt us?

Piasa Bird

However, quite possibly the most impressive pterosaur story is based on art that no longer exists—a story with more layers than an ogre. According to legend, the Illini tribe told two 17th-century French explorers, Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet, a story about the Piasa bird. The Piasa bird had a bad habit of snatching people from canoes for many years until it was finally killed by a group of fearless warriors when it tried to grab their Chief, Ouatoga. In order to commemorate this amazing feat, a rock painting was done of the Piasa bird near Alton, Illinois.

The problem is that there’s no such Native American legend; it was a short story written by American author John Russell and first published in 1836. However, the story was inspired by impressive rock art described by a French explorer, Father Marquette. You see what I mean with layers.

Marquette had published a description of rock art depicting two monsters, which he and Joliet saw in 1673 on a cliff on the Mississippi near Alton. The monsters were as big as a calf, with horns like a deer and an awful look, red eyes, a beard like a tiger’s, the face something like a man’s, the body covered with scales, and a very long tail that ended in the tail of a fish. The artists used green, red, and black, and it was so well painted that they had trouble believing it had been done by a savage. Oh, the 1600s.

There’s no mention of wings, but I’m sure they meant to add that and just forgot. Unfortunately, the cliff was quarried away by 1847, so the painting is long gone.

However, Russell’s delightful piece of fiction, very loosely based on this description, inspired many to claim that they had also seen this dreadful painting, and various eyewitness descriptions, varying wildly, were soon published in magazines and newspapers. One Canadian missionary mentioned in 1698 that due to weathering, the paintings were practically gone, yet we have credible eyewitness accounts showing up over 100 years later. American author Perry A.

Armstrong (1887) admitted that there were no known photos or images of these monsters. However, he still published a reconstruction of the painting done by an engraver, who had not seen the original, working off paintings made by people who had not seen the original either but worked off descriptions from people who claimed to “be familiar with” the painting at a time when only vague traces of the painting remained, if anything at all. Armstrong’s reconstructions became famous but look nothing like Marquette’s description.

Armstrong was also the first to identify the Piasa bird as a pterosaur; however, no pterosaur has horns or a fishlike tail tip. For that matter, no self-respecting pterosaur willing to be seen in public even vaguely resembles either Marquette’s description or Armstrong’s reconstruction. So, while I hate to spoil everyone’s fun, in this case, I’m fairly certain no natives in Illinois ever encountered a pterosaur.

Further afield in Bernifal Cave, France, you’ll also find a bipedal dinosaur, possibly a theropod, head-butting an angry mammoth. Bernifal Cave is well known for its 24 paintings of mammoths, but you’ll rarely hear anything about the dinosaur. Is this because the only photo we have was taken by a dentist on holiday trespassing on private property and therefore isn’t the best quality image, or is it because evil evolutionists are trying to hide the truth about dinosaurs from impressionable youngsters? If you guessed evil evolutionists, you get a gold star!

Ta Prohm Stegosaurus

Deep in the impenetrable jungles of Cambodia, we find Ta Prohm, a mysterious temple complex with a most perplexing carving. Built as a Buddhist monastery between 800 CE and the 1400s by the Khmer people, the Ta Prohm temple complex became widely known to Western audiences when it was featured on the silver screen in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in 2001. These days a lot of tourists visit the temple, so I guess the jungle isn’t that impenetrable anymore, nor is the temple that mysterious, but the carving is still perplexing.

Almost every square inch of this temple is covered with detailed relief carvings depicting religious and mythological figures as well as all manner of beasts, including water birds, parrots, deer, and monkeys, while others are a little more ambiguous. Among these carvings is a stout, four-legged animal with a big head, hanging low, and a tail hanging down, like that of a dog. Six triangular plates are arranged on the animal’s back.

According to two books published in 1997 and 1999, the carving “bears a striking resemblance to a stegosaurus.” Did man and dinosaur traverse the jungles of Cambodia together, or is this just a hoax?

The carving of the stegosaurus is lighter in appearance than those around it, which led to speculation that it’s newer or it’s been altered more recently; however, it’s the most photographed carving in the entire temple, so it’s also the cleanest carving in the entire temple, which might explain the colour. The depth of the relief carving is similar to those around it; if the stegosaur had been carved after another carving had been removed, the recesses of the new carving should be deeper than those around it. Replacing a section of the wall would also be very difficult to do and even more difficult to hide.

The temple is a busy and well-guarded tourist attraction, so it’s unlikely that anyone would be able to alter a carving without being spotted. Personally, I believe the carving is genuine, but is it a dinosaur?

Some Young Earth Creationists have described the carving as an anatomically correct stegosaur. This is an impressive level of wishful thinking. There are a lot of anatomical issues with this dinosaur. Firstly, the head is too big—around a quarter the size of the body; Stegosaurus had a very small head. Both the head and the tail were long, graceful, and tapered to a point. Another problem is the lack of a thagomizer, the arrangement of four tail spikes that led to the sad demise of the late Thag Simmons. The tail spikes are one of the more unique features of the Stegosaurus, so it seems odd that an artist would ignore them. The Stegosaurus also had around 17 plates on its back, not a mere six, and the two small horns or large ears—we’re not sure—on the carving’s head presents another problem, as the Stegosaurus had neither floppy ears nor horns. The position of the tail is also problematic. Dinosaur tails didn’t hang down but were held more horizontally. So, can we explain these discrepancies?

Our current restorations of dinosaurs involve a fair amount of guesswork. Soft tissue and cartilage don’t fossilize well, and if you’re trying to assemble the skeleton of a creature you’ve never seen before, you’re bound to get some things wrong. It’s possible that stegosaurs, like any other species on earth, exhibited some variety—like more, less, or no spikes on the tail—or a bigger skull. It’s also possible that juveniles only grew their spikes as they matured, so perhaps a young stegosaur didn’t have tail spikes yet. It’s also possible that the artist didn’t have a living stegosaur posing while he did the carving. Perhaps he only saw the creature once or twice and was working off memory, or worse, he had never seen a stegosaur and was working off other people’s descriptions. Our carver also had a small canvas—a limited circular area—on which to work, so perhaps he left off some details, like tail spikes and 11 plates, in order to fit the picture into the circle. Artists are also well-known for taking all kinds of unholy liberties when it comes to creating art, so perhaps what we’re seeing is a stylized impression of a Stegosaurus.

However, there might be another possibility. The head might seem wide because the animal is muzzled. Yes, you heard that right. Cambodians in the early 1300s were domesticating dinosaurs and slapped a muzzle on a captive Stegosaurus. This oversized muzzle could also then double as a bridle to attach reins. I doubt that they rode the dinosaur—those back plates might get in the way—but domestication would certainly explain the lack of tail spikes. If you’re domesticating a Stegosaurus, you’re probably going to remove the dangerous bits. Domesticating a dinosaur is quite an achievement, so I find it remarkable that no one thought to write that down or depict it in any other artwork than a single carving in a jungle temple in the middle of Cambodia. We have no other writings, illustrations, or artifacts—like oversized harnesses and muzzles or tools for cutting off horns—to suggest that dinosaurs were being domesticated. Gold star for creativity, fail on science.

Skeptics argue that the plates on the animal’s back are just foliage, since all the other carvings have background details. The stegosaurus would be one of few, if not the only, carving without any background vegetation. However, even if you remove the plates and assume they are just really big leaves, the shape of the animal could still be a ceratopsian-like dinosaur. It could also be a hippo, a single-horned Javan rhinoceros—which lived in the region when the temple was built—a chameleon, or a mountain horned lizard, also known as a horned dragon. Sure, none of these animals exactly fit the carving, but is a Stegosaurus really a better match?

Bishop Bell’s Crypt

In 1496, Bishop Bell, who became the bishop of Carlisle in 1478, finally traded this life for the next and was buried under the floor of Carlisle Cathedral, perhaps to keep an eye on his flock. His tomb was built to last—a bronze vault decorated with engravings of animals carved into the narrow brass fillet that runs round the outer edges of the tomb. The engravings have been around for more than 600 years, so they’re a little faded, but the animals are still recognizable and include things like an eel, bird, bat, fox, dolphin, and three dogs—or perhaps two dogs and a weasel, we can’t really tell.

However, alongside these living animals, we find a pair of long-necked creatures, their necks intertwined, which, according to believers, could be two sauropods either fighting or courting, who knows. One of the sauropods has an oddly shaped tail that could be clubbed or cleft with spikes on the end. Skeptics have suggested mythological creatures; personally, I’m leaning towards giraffe, but in 1987, a Shunosaurus, a type of sauropod, was uncovered with what appeared to be a clubbed tail. In 2009, we also found another sauropod, the Spinophorosaurus, with spikes on the end of its tail. So, not only have we found two possible sauropods that resemble one of the dinosaurs on the tomb, the carvings also depict details that would only be rediscovered by scientists over 500 years later.

The second sauropod doesn’t have anything remarkable about its tail, so we’re possibly looking at two different dinosaurs, or an adult and a juvenile, fighting over territory. It seems that people in northern England in the late 1400s had a front-row seat to sauropod battles. Personally, I wouldn’t have stuck around long enough to get a detailed view for an engraving for a tomb, but maybe fighting dinosaurs were friendlier than fighting giraffes.

St. George and the Dragon

St. George slaying the ferocious dragon is a very common motif in medieval art. According to the story, a dragon was eating the town’s livestock and demanding human sacrifices. A beautiful princess was chosen to be the sacrifice, but before she was killed, the brave George showed up, killed the dragon, and saved the damsel.

The story was pretty well known throughout Europe, and many an artist used it as inspiration for their masterpiece, so we have many paintings of many different dragons of various sizes and ferociousness all over Europe.

St. George’s Chapel in Barcelona, Spain, contains an altar cloth depicting a dragon with a long, crocodilian-type body and long curved teeth at the front of the jaw with smaller teeth towards the back, all very reminiscent of the Nothosaurus. In the French National Library, we find an image of a dragon with a flattened head, a feature typical of the Baryonyx dinosaur, and in Belgium, a slender reptile with a long neck makes an appearance even though there were no crocodiles or monitor lizards running around Belgium in 1440. Many other works of art use a more generic dragon shape that could be interpreted as pretty much any dinosaur, though sauropods and ceratopsians seemed to be particularly popular. The dragon is also sometimes depicted as a sea-monster. In one image, St. George swoops down on a winged horse to save the princess from an island guarded by a sea-dragon that looks remarkably like a mesosaur. Clearly the artists must’ve seen living or dead dinosaurs—I’m guessing dead, since a dead dinosaur is less likely to try and eat you. The dragons look so different because each artist was inspired by whatever dinosaur lived in their part of the world. However, I’m more intrigued by the winged horse. If dragons were based on dinosaurs, what was the inspiration for the flying horse?

Sea Dragons

Sea dragons also show up quite a lot in ancient art, especially maps, leading to some suggestions that sailors ran into marine reptiles, like plesiosaurs and mesosaurs, and turned their chilling adventures into art for future generations to marvel at.

One of the oldest tales of sea serpents we have in written form comes from Olaus Magnus in his book Historia de Gentibus, in which he tells the story of a Catholic priest, exiled from his homeland of Sweden, coming face to face with a sea serpent, around 23 meters or 75 feet long, near an island called Moo in 1522. Since we know that Catholic priests never lie, the story must be true. In 1539, Magnus wrote another book, Carta Marina, in which he presented the most accurate map of Scandinavia at the time. Maps often show sea dragons, and this map is no different, depicting a whole lot of sea serpents, the most notorious being “Sea Orm” or “Olaus’s Sea Serpent.” In the drawing, the serpent is wrapped around a Norman ship chomping down on the crew. The serpent is described as black, but on the map, it’s coloured red. However, despite this discrepancy in its description and depiction, it’s all true, and our map-maker encountered ocean-dwelling dinosaurs.

Krokodilopardalis

The Greek and Roman world was filled with mythological beings and great heroes, so it’s no surprise that we find a lot of dragons in Greek and Roman art—on vases, on coins, in murals, statues, and mosaics—with the ketos, another sea dragon possibly based on plesiosaurs or mesosaurs, being very popular. Many of these dragons were most likely serpents or impressive lizards, but what about the Krokodilopardalis—did one Roman artist include a dinosaur in his mosaic?

The Nile Mosaic of Palestrina can be found in the Palazzo Barberini in Palestrina, just south of Rome, and depicts scenes along the Nile, all the way from ancient Egypt well into Ethiopia. The piece was probably the work of Demetrius the Topographer, an artist from Alexandria who worked in Rome, and created sometime around the 2nd century BCE. The mosaic is massive—it’s 5.85 meters wide and 4.31 meters tall—and gives us an interesting view of the ancient Roman fascination with the mysteries of ancient Egypt. The top half of the mosaic portrays some recognizable African animals being hunted by dark-skinned warriors or hunters. However, one of these animals, labeled Krokodilopardalis, seems to be an unknown creature. The name literally translates to crocodile-leopard, so either the artist was making stuff up, or there was something terrifying stalking the Nile River.

The creature has a long, thick tail and an impressively-sized mouth and teeth that you would expect to see on a dinosaur. It’s brown in colour and appears to be lying down. So, what are we looking at? There have been many suggestions, including some kind of theropod—the family T-Rex belongs to—perhaps a hadrosaur or the ever-reliable sauropod, just a tiny one. As one person also pointed out, the name, crocodile-leopard, could refer to an animal that’s a combination of a reptile and a mammal. If you’re an ancient artist, not a dinosaur expert, I’m sure a dinosaur would certainly look like a combination of a reptile and a mammal, unless, of course, they had feathers. Some skeptics have suggested that perhaps the artist was trying to depict a monitor lizard, and the Nile monitor is a native of the region, but the creature doesn’t look much like a lizard. However, if you compare the picture of the krokodilopardalis with, say, an otter, the similarities are remarkable. Aggressive otter, under-sized sauropod or theropod—will the uncertainty never cease?

The Ica Stones

The Ica Stones are a collection of between 11,000 and 16,000 engraved stones found in Peru, ranging from pebbles to boulders. The stone is very hard and incredibly difficult to carve, but carve the ancients did; the stones are engraved with all manner of things—recognizable animals and people, flowers, mythological creatures, as well as detailed carvings of dinosaurs, people riding dinosaurs, dinosaurs eating people, and ancient people using telescopes and doing complex surgery.

According to some sources, the stones were first discovered by a Jesuit missionary, Padre Simon, in 1525, and some stones were sent to Spain in 1562, but I’m not sure how true that is. Then, in 1966, Peruvian physician Javier Cabrera Darquea received a stone carved with what appeared to be an extinct fish as a birthday gift. Fascinated by this stone, he started collecting more, buying 300 stones from two brothers, Carlos and Pablo Solte, collectors of pre-Incan artifacts.

Later, he found another supplier, a farmer called Basilio Uschuya who claimed to have found a huge cache of these stones when the Ica River overflowed its banks, exposing an unknown cave. He refused to reveal the location of his treasure trove but agreed to sell thousands of the stones to Cabrera, growing his collection to 11,000 stones by the 1970s.

It didn’t take long for other researchers, and eventually the government, to learn about this extraordinary find, which is when things got a little hot for our stone-selling farmer. Selling the country’s antiquities is strictly forbidden under Peruvian law, so the farmer was promptly arrested. Facing the prospect of spending years in a Peruvian prison, the farmer very quickly told anyone who would listen, especially the government, that he didn’t actually find anything; he had personally carved the 15,000 stones he initially said he found. To back up his story, he even showed them how he did it.

The stones were declared a hoax, the farmer released, and the matter considered closed. However, not everyone was convinced.

Cabrera had his own theories about where the stones came from, featuring aliens and advanced civilizations; he wasn’t that interested in the dinosaurs. In 1996, he opened a museum showcasing his vast collection. Those who are convinced that the Ica stones are the real deal believe that the forging farmer, Uschuya, only told authorities he forged the stones because he didn’t want to go to prison, which seems like a reasonable theory to me.

I wouldn’t want to go to a Peruvian prison either. In a later interview with a journalist, he even claimed that he lied about forging the stones, and it does seem a bit unlikely that a single farmer can forge around 15,000 stones—he wouldn’t have a lot of time left for farming. However, the fact that most of the dinosaurs looked like we thought they looked back in the 60s and 70s, tails dragging on the ground, didn’t help our farmer’s credibility.

Surely, if the carvers had actually seen living dinosaurs, they probably would’ve gotten that little detail right.

However, forging farmers and people dealing in antiquities aren’t the only finders of these stones. Some Ica Stones, held in prestigious museums all over the world, were found by archaeologists in tombs dating from around 500 BCE to 1000 CE. The images on these stones are very similar to the ones in Cabrera’s collection, and at least one stone carved with a creature that looks like a dinosaur was discovered in the spring of 2001.

According to authorities from the Palpa Museum, an engraved stone depicting what could be a very simplistic sauropod and other recognizable animals were uncovered in a Nazcan tomb complex in the presence of around 30 eyewitnesses, including museum staff and archaeologists. I tried to dig up more on this specific find, but sadly it seems that no one did a follow-up academic paper on this specific stone, so this seems to be all we know.

While many of the stones show dinosaurs dragging their tails, there are some carvings showing dinosaurs holding their tails more perpendicular to their bodies, something we didn’t know in the 1960s, though this became more accepted by the 1970s. Ancient ceramics, on display in the museum of Lima, also show long-necked reptilian creatures, and tapestries found in tombs in the area show repeating patterns that could be sauropods, or perhaps llamas, which believers insist prove that the ancient Peruvians were familiar with dinosaurs. So, are the Ica Stones genuine or hoax? Probably a bit of both.

The stones found by archaeologists are probably genuine artifacts and so quite valuable. The local people, many of them very poor, realized that the archaeologists and foreigners were getting very excited about these stones and, like any good entrepreneur will tell you, give the people what they want. Our farmer probably found a few of these stones on his property and, using them as an example, carved some more.

When he found a market for them, he became creative, experimenting with new designs, and the dinosaur line just really took off. Personally, I don’t believe it was an intentional hoax to try and convince the world ancient Peruvians frolicked around with dinosaurs, but who knows. Perhaps the stone to break the case is still buried and waiting to be found.

Acambaro Figurines

In 1950, stories of a large collection of strange, ancient figurines hit the Mexican and American press. A German shopkeeper, Waldemar Julsrud, had bought a collection of over 33,000 clay figurines, some apparently depicting dinosaurs, made by an unknown culture, from some local excavators. However, another article claimed that the figurines had been found by Julsrud himself at the foot of El Toro Mountains in 1945. One figurine was a creature with a pudgy body, short tail, flippers, and a long neck—are we looking at a plesiosaur? Another creature appears to be a typical sea monster with a shorter neck that some speculate might be a swimming Pliosaurus. The collection also includes an accurate Brachiosaurus as well as a figurine resembling an Iguanodon with details that a forger in the 1940s wouldn’t have been aware of yet. A Tyrannosaurus-like theropod and an Ankylosaurus, with distinct horns and dermal spikes, with the beak slightly broken off, among other more generic dinosaurs, also make up part of the collection. The dinosaurs are modeled in agile, active poses, suggesting that our ancient artists saw living dinosaurs in action.

Professional Mexican archaeologists were quick to declare the figurines as fakes, but those outside the archaeological community weren’t so easily convinced. As with the Ica Stones, the sheer number of figurines suggests that they can’t all be fakes unless an entire village had been involved in the forgery; however, if the aim was making fake artifacts, copying known artifacts would be more lucrative and fetch higher prices if you could pass them off as authentic. Some have also suggested that people in a small village in a third world country couldn’t possibly be educated enough to know about dinosaurs, but that one is really getting old now. The fact that no fossils had ever been found in the Acambaro region and no other Mexican cultures ever mention dinosaurs does present a problem to the creationists, but luckily they can just choose to ignore these facts.

In 1969 and 1972, a new technique for dating artifacts, thermoluminescence, dated the figurines to around 2500 BCE, reigniting the debate about the figurines’ authenticity. However, when more tests were performed in 1978, when the technique had been refined a bit, no date could be determined with any real certainty, so, once again, the figurines were considered to be modern fakes. At this point, it’s probably worth mentioning that American movies had been playing at Acambaro’s cinemas, and villagers had access to local comic books and newspapers back when the figurines were first discovered. So, dinosaurs in Mexico, or fans of American movies making some action figurines—who knows?

Da Vinci’s Dragon

In 1517 or 1518, Leonardo da Vinci developed a bit of an obsession with cats, leading to a detailed figure study of kitties in a variety of poses today housed in the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace. Da Vinci did a lot of studies on the movements of various animals like horses, dogs, and even crabs, all based on careful observations of the animal in question. The pen and ink drawing, titled “Cats, Lions, and a Dragon,” contains mostly domesticated felines with the occasional lion or two chucked into the mix presumably to keep things interesting.

Tucked in among all the cats is one little dragon—a precursor to Toothless perhaps. The lone dragon in the sketch apparently resembles a sauropod dinosaur, which would only be discovered in Europe around three centuries later. The tail of the dragon is coiled, which as far as we know wasn’t something sauropods could do, but was there perhaps a smaller kind of sauropod in Europe that could coil its tail like a snake?

Not So Ancient Art

Some excitement gripped the world more recently when dinosaurs showed up in a painting done in 1562. In the background, it appears that humans are riding a few Brachiosauruses like big, probably very scaly, horses. Since we weren’t supposed to know about dinosaurs in 1562, does this painting finally reveal the truth?

The painting, titled “The Suicide of Saul,” done by Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, depicts the suicide of King Saul after getting his ass kicked by the Philistines on Mount Gilboa. In the background, you can see riders on odd-looking animals with long necks that some people immediately identified as sauropods. A far more likely explanation for these brave souls travelling by sauropod is that Pieter, for all his talents, had never seen a camel before.

Camels weren’t exactly running around the streets of Europe, and picture references for artists back in 1562 were a bit shoddy, I’m told. So, time-travelling dinosaurs, an accidental exposé of a world-wide conspiracy to hide the fact that humans and dinosaurs lived together, or slightly rubbish camels? Personally, I like time-travelling dinosaurs, but that’s probably not it.

It seems that Pieter didn’t get the memo on keeping human-dinosaur coexistence a secret, or perhaps old Pieter was a bit of a rebel, intentionally painting dinosaurs to prove what the establishment would try and hide hundreds of years later. A true visionary, it seems.

What About Fossils?

Is it possible that ancient people didn’t actually see dinosaurs but rather based their drawings of dragons, or dinosaurs, depending on your school of thought, on what dinosaurs left behind: their bones? Ancient art often shows humans and dragons interacting or at least co-existing, often combined with known animals, so perhaps the artists saw fossils and filled in the blanks on their respective canvasses, be it pottery, cave walls, or mosaics.

Finding, excavating, correctly assembling, and then drawing what we think the dinosaur might’ve looked like is a time-consuming process undertaken by people with specialized training. To date, while some may argue that we have proof of Ancient Aliens, we have yet to uncover proof of Ancient Paleontologists, so it’s unlikely that ancient people were assembling dinosaurs in their spare time. Sure, they were finding ancient bones—in China, dragon bones were considered medicine, and in Europe they were often traded as relics or curiosities—but no one was collecting these bones to reconstruct and draw pictures of the animals they belonged to, and paleo-artists today don’t go and sit in the field next to a fossil bed to draw a dinosaur based on a jumble of bones.

I find myself partially agreeing with creationists, which might explain why it’s snowing in South Africa in September. Even today, with all we know and reassembled skeletons to work from, paleo-artists are still doing a lot of guesswork. I find it unlikely that someone could look at a pile of bones—since we rarely find fossils intact—and draw an animal based on that.

Living alongside dinosaurs, a careful study of fossils, or simply using their imagination—where did our ancestors get their inspiration for dragons in both art and literature? Imagination is probably the most plausible answer, but perhaps some smaller breeds of dinosaurs, or a later descendant of dinosaurs still to be identified, survived longer than we initially thought and was finally captured in art and preserved in memory.

Dinosaurs in Literature

Stories of lizard-like beasts have been told by explorers, historians, scholars, and even kings and saints. The word “dinosaur,” literally meaning terrible lizard, was only coined in 1841, so story-tellers had to use a different word to describe their intimidating lizards: dragon. I could talk about dragon stories all day, but for the sake of everyone’s sanity, we’ll only look at a few dragons that could be dinosaurs.

Marco Polo’s Dragons

Marco Polo, Venetian merchant, explorer, and writer, came back from his travels through China telling stories of large reptiles, though he used the word serpent, walking on two legs, with three claws on each, like a tiger, large eyes, a mouth large enough to swallow a man, and large sharp teeth to better eat you with. The creatures lived in caves and caverns, mostly hunting at night. Fearsome as they might’ve been, the gall was prized as medicine, and the meat considered particularly flavorful, so apparently in China they hunted and ate their dragons. Unfortunately, Marco Polo isn’t the most credible of witnesses, but we have to wonder: did he see humans hunting dinosaurs or two-legged crocodiles?

British Dragons

According to British Dragons, written in 1980 by Jacqueline Simpson, over 70 villages in Great Britain have various legends and traditions involving dragons. In the county of Somerset, we have the tale of Blue Ben, a dragon living at Kilve, on the north coast of Somerset. The fire-breathing monstrosity lived in caves and built itself a causeway across the mudflats to reach the sea where it could cool off. Unfortunately for Blue Ben, the devil came a-knocking looking for a steed, and an unwilling Blue Ben got the job. The gig was about as much fun as you’d expect, so Blue Ben tried to escape back to his cave, got stuck in the mud, and drowned. Poor Ben. Interestingly, Somerset is also very rich in dinosaur fossils, especially ichthyosaur and plesiosaurs, thus suggesting some correlation between the fossils, the dinosaurs, and the stories of dragons. Did the people of Somerset see dinosaurs, or did they see huge bones in a mudflat and make up a story to explain the bones?

Beowulf

The tale of Beowulf and his beloved beer hall is one of the earliest poems we have written in the English language, though I don’t recommend reading the original—English has come a long way. The manuscript dates to around 1000 CE, but the events of the story take place around the 5th and 6th century in Denmark. According to some Young Earth Creationists, the character of Beowulf is based on an actual person, and the poem is an eyewitness account of a dinosaur slaying. While some of the characters in the epic are definitely based on historical figures, the question of whether Beowulf himself was a real person or not is still a matter of debate among literary historians, so this argument is already on shaky ground, but that hasn’t stopped us yet.

Apparently, by the time Beowulf got round to sending Grendel on to the after-life, he was already a seasoned hunter of reptilian monsters after clearing the local sea lanes of predatory sea monsters attacking Viking ships. The writer of the poem uses different words to describe different monsters, suggesting that the Saxons were familiar with a wide range of reptilian creatures. In Grendel’s lair, a large swampy lake, our heroes come upon a race of monsters and serpents, including giant sea drakes, sunbathing on the shores of the lake only to skedaddle at the sound of the battle horn—smart dragons. However, a few of the slower ones got skewered by Beowulf’s men, thus decreasing the population and, with it, our chance of seeing dinosaurs. The very last reptile killed by Beowulf, which ended up killing Beowulf as well, was a flying reptile, with bat-like wings, a venomous bite, and breathing fire to boot, hoarding its treasures in a cave. Apparently this fits the description of a Pteranodon, one of the largest known pterosaurs with a wingspan of over 6 meters. I didn’t realize Pteranodons were venomous, breathed fire, and loved gold.

Of course, the monster Beowulf is best known for slaying is Grendel. Grendel wasn’t just a nickname; apparently, it referred to a specific species of animal. The Danes may have viewed it as a demon-like monster and fiend straight from hell, but descriptions of Grendel and his mom indicated that both creatures were bipedal. Grendel had a very tough hide, but its forelimbs, or claws, were small. It had a large, strong jaw and huge teeth and could easily swallow the body of a man. It was also a fierce hunter that preferred to hunt at night. All this seems to add up to Velociraptor, the cute little guys from the first Jurassic Park movie, though some think Grendel could’ve been a T-Rex. This definitely puts Beowulf’s adventures in a whole new light.

The Dragons of Herodotus and Regulus

Due to their importance in mythology, it’s no surprise to find tales of dragons in the work of ancient Greek and Roman scholars and philosophers. One such writer was the Greek historian and geographer, Herodotus. Travelling to a city called Buto, somewhere in the Nile Delta, Herodotus heard tales of winged snakes.

According to the locals, they used storax smoke to drive these winged snakes out of the frankincense trees so they could collect frankincense, an aromatic resin used in perfumes. These winged serpents would also fly towards Egypt each spring where they were usually killed by ibises, a kind of bird, well before they arrived. You’d think they would eventually learn and go somewhere else.

Investigating the story further, Herodotus came across a pile of bones, too many to count, just outside the city. He described these winged snakes as small and similar in shape to water snakes but with wings that resemble those of a bat rather than a bird. Had Herodotus discovered some suicidal pterosaurs based on the leathery wings?

The description of a water snake doesn’t really gel with the image of a pterosaur, but if you’re hunting for dinosaurs in ancient sources, it’s important to only focus on the details that prove your point and ignore the details that don’t, so clearly Herodotus had encountered pterosaurs.

Roman legionnaires also had encounters with dragons. Around 256 BCE, during the First Punic War, Roman General Marcus Regulus and his unit were camped at the Bagradas River near Carthage when they were attacked by a most ferocious creature who managed to eat a few of them before it was finally killed with a catapult and spears. It had glowing eyes, a flickering forked tongue, and large fangs.

The creature was around 120 feet (36 meters) long and crawled on its belly. The animal was skinned, and the skin and jaw shipped off to Rome where it was preserved in a temple until it disappeared sometime during the Numantine War (143–133 BCE). This little detail really adds to the authenticity of the tale; unfortunately, all the tellers of this tale were too young to have seen this remarkable jaw and skin for themselves.

So, what did the Roman legionnaires kill that day, if not a dragon? Since it didn’t have feet, I’m thinking a really big snake that has since gone extinct because it was killed by Romans intruding on its territory, but I could be wrong.

Historically, up to the 1500s, you get quite a lot of accounts of encounters with dragons, but they gradually become less and less. Apparently, it was only in 1910 when someone finally claimed that dragons were only a myth; before that, dragons were accepted to be real animals, rare, perhaps, but still very real. So, who knows, perhaps a few dinosaurs did manage to hang on a bit longer.

Neodinosaurs

Living dinosaurs, also called neodinosaurs, make up their own category of cryptids and include animals that are considered “remarkably dinosaurian in alleged appearance.” Sauropods seem to be the most common kind of neodinosaur cryptid, but ceratopsians, iguanodonts, and theropods also show up in reported sightings. They’ve been spotted on every continent except Antarctica—either they don’t like the cold, or the penguins don’t mind them and therefore haven’t reported them yet. Falling back on the coelacanth argument, a fish considered to have gone extinct in the Cretaceous era only to be caught off the coast of South Africa in 1938, cryptozoologists argue that, if a fish could stay hidden for millions of years, why not dinosaurs?

Possibly the most famous cryptid to ever not quite walk the earth is the Loch Ness Monster. For a long time, it was believed that Nessie was the last surviving plesiosaur, since pictures of Nessie resemble an Elasmosaurus, as much as a floating log could resemble an Elasmosaurus. Loch Ness is very deep, but not that big, so if a colony of plesiosaurs were chilling around the Highlands, they would’ve been found by now. We’re pretty sure Nessie isn’t real; however, many a cryptozoologist has spent sleepless nights wondering whether all the plesiosaurs and pliosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago along with their land-dwelling cousins. The oceans are vast, dark, and very deep, so perhaps a colony might have survived… somewhere.

However, outside of the ocean, it seems that you’re most likely to run into a neodinosaur in the jungles of Africa. In fairness, Africa is a big continent, with some pretty dense forests and lots of rural villages with a low villager count, so if there were dinosaurs running around, this is most likely where they’d be. Probably the best known of the African neodinosaurs is the Mokele-Mbembe, a sauropod-like, three-toed amphibious creature calling the swamps and rivers of the Congo Basin in Central Africa home. It’s amazing how elusive a 20-ton Apatosaurus can be, though, since no one’s ever been able to catch more than a glimpse of her.

Other neodinosaurs running around Africa include the Emela-Ntouka, a lost ceratopsian and elephant killer. The creature is reddish-brown in colour, hairless, and almost as large as an elephant with massive legs, but still able to submerge itself under water. If a hapless elephant should come along and try to cross the swamp, the Emela-Ntouka will attack the elephant savagely, disemboweling it with the horn on its snout. It doesn’t eat the elephant, though; like the hippo, it’s a herbivore that wakes up each morning and chooses violence.

The horn is solid ivory, like the tusks of an elephant, not compressed hair like the horn of a rhino. How exactly we know this, seeing as no one’s ever caught one, I’m not entirely clear. Of course, we have no fossils showing that ceratopsians ever inhabited Africa, but let’s not get tripped up on details.

We also have stegosaurs, the Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu—so impressive they named it thrice—and the Nguma-Monene. The Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu is a semi-aquatic creature, preferring swamps, and has planks growing out of its back according to one witness. At least stegosaurs did live in Africa, so we’re getting a little closer, but they were definitely not aquatic. The Kasai Rex is supposedly a large theropod dinosaur living in East Africa, but it seems that even the die-hards agree that this one is unlikely since there’s a distinct lack of rhinos and buffaloes with really big bite marks in them.

Across the oceans in South America, chilling in the Atacama Desert in Chile, you might be lucky, or unlucky, enough to cross paths with the Arica Beast. In an interesting case of evolving dinosaur, the cryptid was originally described as a large, bipedal creature, similar to a kangaroo in the 80s, but in the 90s, the description changed to a creature more resembling a velociraptor from Jurassic Park. As our understanding of dinosaurs changes, so does the description of this monster, with later descriptions even including feathers. This feathered monstrosity, or scaly or hairy, depending on who saw it and when they saw it, is around 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall with sharp teeth and a three-toed footprint. It’s also very fast, so you might not be able to outrun this guy. The most recent report of this creature that I could find dated to 2004, so this dinosaur is still alive and well. Or it was, 20 years ago.

There are many more examples of neodinosaurs all over the world, though so far, no one has ever managed to catch one. So, are there living dinosaurs running around the jungles of Africa, or are these sightings based on animals that we just haven’t identified yet? Or perhaps our ancestors lived with the last dinosaur hold-outs, now long gone, and the tales of swamp monsters were passed on from one generation to the next, culminating in the less-than-scientific field of cryptozoology.

Science

I’ve presented to you art, literature, and the Bible, and you’re still not convinced, so it’s time to pull out the big guns—science. Do we have any scientific proof that dinosaurs and humans lived together? Well, we might. At the very least, there’s some evidence that dinosaurs didn’t die out millions of years ago.

Soft tissue, including stretchy soft tissue, collagen, blood vessels, cells, and proteins, have been recovered from dinosaur fossils. This is remarkable, since while it’s theoretically possible for soft tissue to be preserved for thousands of years in a cool, dry, sterile environment, the odds of soft tissues surviving for 65 million years seems impossible, and could suggest that radiometric dating is even less reliable than we think. Apparently, soft tissue had been found in a long list of dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus rex, Hadrosaurus, Triceratops, Seismosaurus, Thescelosaurus, and Psittacosaurus. A number of Mesozoic marine reptiles have also been discovered with some of their biomaterial still intact. According to a bioengineer and professor with University College London, the fossils in which these materials were found showed no evidence of having been specially preserved by nature in any way. Basically, they were just your typical dinosaur fossil, suggesting that the preservation of soft tissues and proteins might be more common than was previously realized. In fact, similar finds could be waiting in a number of bones held in museums. Of course, to test this theory, we would have to break the bones, and it seems that most museums aren’t quite ready to do that yet. Does this discovery prove that dinosaurs didn’t die out millions of years ago, or perhaps that a few managed to hang on a bit longer than initially thought, or was science wrong and soft tissue can be preserved much longer than anticipated given the right circumstances?

Conclusion

The fact is that we all really want to see a dinosaur; we’re so keen on seeing dinosaurs, we like to imagine that our ancestors lived alongside dinosaurs. However, had they lived together, our human ancestors would probably have been eaten by dinosaurs, which would’ve left a very distinct print in the archaeological record: pictures of humans hunting dinosaurs on cave walls, dinosaur teeth and bone ornaments and utensils, ancient human bodies with catastrophic levels of damage as the dinosaurs munched on their bones, and a lot more stories about dinosaurs and people living together. The occasional evil dragon being slain by a bored knight doesn’t count.

Sadly, at the end of the day, there’s no proof that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. If every story and piece of art were based on fact, winged horses would’ve been flying around Europe, the Minotaur would’ve been running around Greece, and Picasso would’ve had a serious problem with depth perception. Art by its very nature is subjective; even if it’s a painting of a person or place, it’s still the artist’s impression of the subject, and even though some stories may have a basis in fact, even more have absolutely no basis in fact whatsoever—it’s called imagination.

So, much as I enjoyed going down this rabbit-hole, I think I can say with a fair amount of certainty: dinosaurs and humans never coexisted. If you still believe that sauropods with their long necks roamed the earth along with our ancestors, constantly getting into fights with each other, please go and watch a video on fighting giraffes. It’ll answer so many of your questions.

Frequently Asked Questions

What do Young Earth Creationists believe about the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs?

Young Earth Creationists believe that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together, and all the proof you need can be found in the Bible. They interpret the book of Genesis literally, stating that God created the earth and everything on it in seven 24-hour periods, meaning the earth is only a few thousand years old, not millions of years.

What does the Bible say about dinosaurs?

The Bible mentions three creatures that could be dinosaurs: the Tanniyn, the Leviathan, and the behemoth. The behemoth is often presented as a detailed description of a dinosaur in the Old Testament book of Job, but the description also includes details that do not match known dinosaur characteristics.

What is the significance of the Havasupai dinosaur petroglyph?

The Havasupai dinosaur petroglyph, found in the Grand Canyon, is believed by some to depict a living dinosaur, suggesting that the artists had seen dinosaurs. However, most experts believe it is actually a stylized bird or an early attempt at depicting a bird.

What is the story behind the Piasa bird?

The Piasa bird is a legend inspired by a short story written by John Russell in 1836, which was loosely based on a description of rock art by Father Marquette. The story describes a bird that was eventually killed by warriors, but the original rock art no longer exists, and the legend is considered fictional.

What is the Ta Prohm Stegosaurus carving in Cambodia?

The Ta Prohm Stegosaurus carving is a relief found in the Ta Prohm temple complex in Cambodia. Some believe it depicts a stegosaurus, but skeptics argue that it could represent other animals like a hippo or a rhinoceros, and the carving has anatomical issues that do not match known stegosaurus characteristics.

What are the Ica Stones and what do they depict?

The Ica Stones are a collection of engraved stones found in Peru, depicting various animals, including dinosaurs. Some stones were found by archaeologists in tombs dating from around 500 BCE to 1000 CE, but many are considered hoaxes, as a farmer admitted to carving them to sell to collectors.

What are the Acambaro figurines and what do they depict?

The Acambaro figurines are a collection of clay figurines found in Mexico, some of which depict dinosaurs. Professional Mexican archaeologists declared them fakes, but some believe they are genuine artifacts, possibly dating back to 2500 BCE, based on thermoluminescence dating.

What is the significance of the soft tissue found in dinosaur fossils?

The discovery of soft tissue, including collagen and blood vessels, in dinosaur fossils suggests that these materials can be preserved for much longer than previously thought. This has led some to question the reliability of radiometric dating and the extinction timeline of dinosaurs.

What are neodinosaurs and where have they been reported?

Neodinosaurs are living dinosaurs or dinosaur-like creatures reported in various parts of the world, including Africa, South America, and even Loch Ness in Scotland. These sightings are often attributed to cryptids, but there is no scientific evidence to support their existence.

What is the conclusion about the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs?

There is no scientific proof that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Stories and art depicting such coexistence are likely based on imagination or misinterpretations of fossils and other natural phenomena.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: This is the Best Evidence that Humans Lived with Dinosaurs
• Hero image source by thegetty / openverse, cc0.