Extinct reptiles depicted in 2,000-year-old art?
The image above represents the famous Nile Mosaic of Palestrina, a work of art from the Roman era, created around 2,000 years ago, a mosaic that represents men and animals who lived near the course of the longest African river. The mosaic underwent several restorations, and was even dismantled and rebuilt. If we think that this happened in the eighteenth century we might have some doubts as to whether the correspondence with the original mosaic has been fully preserved.
Nonetheless, the presence of some strange animals in this mosaic has aroused suspicion among more open-minded scholars.
Among the animals there is one that presents disconcerting characteristics, and which in the mosaic is indicated by the name of crocodilopardalis, or something that we could translate as crocodile-leopard. But which living being has an appearance that resembles a feline on one side and a crocodile on the other?
The order of reptiles today numbers only a fraction of the thousands upon thousands of species once present on our planet, and among those that have survived to the present era no good candidate can be found that corresponds to that "crocodileopard", presumably (judging by the name and its depiction) a carnivorous reptile with some characteristics that relate it to mammals.
Obviously it cannot be ruled out that this animal is a product of the author's imagination, although it seems difficult to me to think that the restorations of the work of art have distorted the representation so much as to transform a normal inhabitant of the Nile area into a reptiloid being with leg joints that absolutely do not correspond to those of living reptiles, but which resemble those of dinosaurs or other orders of extinct reptiles, such as the therapsids, for example.
Below, as an example, I show an illustration of the therapsid Biarmosuchus.
So far it could only be a suspicion, a curious coincidence, but on closer inspection there are many other animals in that mosaic that could seem "out of place". For an overview of these animals you can consult the English creationist site thefirstsixdays.com (the fact that I do not share their creationist approach clearly does not mean that the data presented on that site is meaningless).
Of all of them, the one that seems most convincing to me is a sort of camel of which I report below the representation of the mosaic next to the reconstruction of the Camelops, a camelid that officially became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene.
But there is another representation that comes from Pompeii, from the doctor's house, and therefore also dates back to around 2000 years ago, which shows two beings that look too much like extinct reptiles. The animal on the left is not easily identifiable and may leave room for doubt, but the one on the right is not, and its resemblance to sphenacodontid reptiles or other extinct reptiles (for example some stegosaurid dinosaurs) is notable.
If dinosaurs and other large reptiles really went extinct 60 million years ago, what are all these depictions of them doing in ancient art? However, we may have doubts about some, but about others not at all, see for example the case of the Cambodian stegosaurus.
Below are the depictions of two sphenacodontids and at the bottom an enlarged depiction of the stegosaurid lexovisaur, "relative" of the more famous stegosaurus.
