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"We’ll never know if they knew about dinosaurs, but it is clear that they were curious about the prints and thought they were meaningful in some way.”Called petroglyphs, these carvings are in the shape of stars or circles with internal divisions on a rocky outcrop where sauropod dinosaur footprints are found at the Serrote do Letreiro site in the Brazilian state of Paraíba.
The Serrote do Letreiro petroglyphs aren’t the first examples of rock art found close to dinosaur prints, but the authors of the study said they believe that the unprecedented clarity of the association between the two at this particular site could have significant implications across paleontology, archaeology and cultural heritage studies.
“This region in Brazil is like the Outback in Australia — it’s really hot and there’s no shade, so it’s not easy to stand there and carve the rock. It requires a lot of effort, so when they picked this location, they were being very intentional,” he added. “They could have used so many other rock outcrops in the surroundings, but they chose this one.”
The tracks at Serrote do Letreiro belong to three types of dinosaurs: theropods, sauropods and ornithopods. The researchers suspect that the people who carved the rock might have mistaken some of them for the footprints of rheas — large native birds similar to ostriches, which have tracks that look almost identical to those of theropod dinosaurs.
There are other sites, Troiano said, with petroglyphs in the vicinity of dinosaur footprints — in the United States and Poland — but they are displaying “nowhere near the same level of intentionality,” he said. Intentionality is defined not only by how close the drawings are to the prints but also whether or not they overlap with them. If they don’t overlap, it suggests “thoughtfulness” by the makers, the study suggests.
“The fact that the locations of the rock art panels have been chosen specifically is shown by, among others, the fact that representatives of the communities that created rock paintings or petroglyphs often placed them very close to older images left by other cultures,” Palonka said via email. “This was the case in various parts of the world where rock art was practiced, and it is very clearly visible, among others, in the North American Southwest/U.S.
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