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.

If the painting in fact depicts a dicynodont, it would then predate the first formal scientific record of these animals by at least 10 years.

Researchers say this 200-year-old South African cave painting likely depicts an animal that has been dead for over 200 million years.