© Antiquity Publications Ltd., published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permissionCompiled DStretch images that show the rock art drawings in their entirety. From left to right, notice the two quadrupeds, the tall person, the supplicating person and the snakelike figure. The style of these images matches other Fremont culture rock-art paintings in the region.
The mystery surrounding the ancient rock paintings of Utah's Black Dragon Canyon has finally been solved. For decades, researchers and creationists have debated whether the vibrant red pictographs are images of humans and animals, or rather, depictions of a large winged monster, possibly a pterosaur.
Now, using cutting-edge technology, researchers suggest the red paintings show five separate images, including a tall bug-eyed person, a smaller person, a sheep, a dog and a serpentlike figure.
"It is not a single figure. It is not a pterodactyl," said co-lead researcher Paul Bahn, a freelance archaeologist. "It's a beautiful set of images." [
See Photos of the Rock Paintings from Black Dragon Canyon]
The rock paintings belong to
the agrarian Fremont culture (circa A.D. 1 to 1100). Other Fremont rock paintings — known as Barrier Canyon style — show abstract humanlike figures with elongated bodies and round heads, the researchers wrote in the study.
These long figures are usually accompanied by tiny "attendants," including people, birds and four-legged creatures, such as hoofed animals, canines, felines, badgers and bears.
Amateurs discovered the painting in 1928, and soon after talk of the "winged monster" arose. In 1947, a man named John Simonson traced over the paintings with chalk and said the end result looked like "a weird bird."
Chalking rock art was a common practice in earlier years —
ancient rock art is usually faint, and chalk can help make it visible — but today it's illegal, Bahn said.
"It's one of the worst things you can do, because it damages the art, it imposes what you think you can see on it, it messes up the chemistry of the rock, probably, and it just doesn't disappear," Bahn told Live Science.
Comment: There is still much that we do not understand about ancient civilizations and their technology: