HistoricalChristian.Faith

Does the Ta Prohm "stegosaurus" carving attest dinosaur–human coexistence?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — as the claim that a relief roundel on a Cambodian temple of 1186 depicts a living stegosaur, and therefore that dinosaurs and men shared the world within historical memory. Unlike its neighbours in this group the artifact's date is not in dispute and nothing here needs to be older than it is said to be; what is claimed is that the carving's content is out of place. The resemblance is real and the question is worth putting: the animal is squat and heavy-bodied and carries a row of lobes along an arched back, and the first people to remark on it were the authors of a standard Angkor guidebook, not creationists. It fails on the carving. The same lobes recur around a bird and a water buffalo in the same series of medallions, where nobody reads them as anatomy; Scott Burnett, who went and looked, found a near-identical animal nearby with the lobes absent and everything else the same; and the beast that remains has a wide snout, a large head with two horn-or-ear structures, fore and hind limbs of one length, a ground-hugging tail and no thagomizer — which is to say, it is missing every diagnostic feature of a stegosaur except the one that is shared with the foliage. The mismatches are met one at a time with auxiliary hypotheses — a muzzle for the head, deliberate de-spiking for the tail — that no evidence at the carving constrains. And a success here would not reach the horizon this reconstruction is testing: a twelfth-century AD animal is a post-Flood survival claim, not a window on the world before the water · advanced by David Woetzel in Answers Research Journal, and popularly by Don Patton and Carl Baugh

Related arguments: out-of-place artifacts (dates under skepticism) — see also whether Kailasa at Ellora predates its eighth-century date · the "lathe-turned" pillars of the medieval Deccan · Liangzhu's jades and the technology they required · the epics' vimanas and divine weapons · whether this reconstruction's witnesses are securely dated · Angkor's engineering and the antiquity of the Khmer capital · predynastic Egypt's hard-stone vases · the Great Sphinx's water-erosion redating · the Osireion at Abydos · the Giza radar scans and the "second Sphinx" · Sacsayhuamán's polygonal walls

The claim

Ta Prohm — the Rajavihara, "monastery of the king" — is a Buddhist foundation of Jayavarman VII in the Angkor complex, dedicated in 1186 to the king's mother, whose likeness was carved in the guise of Prajnaparamita. Its stele is one of the great administrative documents of the Khmer empire: 12,640 people resident, 3,140 villages assigned to its upkeep, gold dishes and Chinese silk in its treasury. The temple is also covered in animals. On a doorway pilaster in Gopura III, east of the central sanctuary, runs a vertical strip of circular medallions, each holding a creature.¹

One of them is odd. Inside its roundel sits a squat quadruped in profile, heavy in the body, short in the neck, with a row of lobe-like forms rising in a single line along an arched back. To a modern eye the row reads instantly as the dorsal plates of Stegosaurus. That reading did not begin with apologists: Michael Freeman and Claude Jacques, in their guidebook to the Khmer monuments, called it "a very convincing representation of a stegosaur," and it was from the guidebooks of the later 1990s that the image entered wider circulation.²

The argument built on it is short and, granted its premise, valid. Khmer artists in the twelfth century AD carved an animal they could not have invented from nothing. Therefore something answering to a stegosaur was alive, or recently enough alive to be described, in the historical period — which is what a young earth and a recent Flood would allow and what deep time forbids. In its developed form, argued by David Woetzel from fieldwork at the site, the animal was not merely seen but kept: a captive, worked beast, muzzled and tethered, on the model of the elephant.

Who advances it

The popular lineage runs through Don Patton and Carl Baugh, who circulated photographs from about 2006 and made the carving a fixture of the coexistence case — Baugh sells casts of it and has built an outdoor display around it at his museum in Texas. It is normally cited in company with the Ica burial stones of Peru, the Acámbaro figurines and the Paluxy river tracks, and glossed by Job's behemoth.

The serious version is Woetzel's 2017 paper in the Answers Research Journal, and it is the one worth adjudicating, because it does what the popular version does not: it goes to the pilaster, measures, and answers the standing objection. Woetzel reports that the leaf-and-vine decoration ubiquitous at Ta Prohm sits almost always outside the frame of a roundel, and that where it does intrude it is flat and shallow — about a millimetre of relief, with no leaf work inside any roundel he examined exceeding two. The disputed lobes stand about 2.5 mm above the background plane, against a body relief of just under 3 mm. His inference: "By using relief around 2.5 mm above the background plane, it appears that the artist clearly meant to portray that these plates are part of the animal." He reports a second, similar engraving in a portico with what he takes to be the slenderer head of an unmuzzled animal.³

What would have to hold true

The dating step that the other arguments in this group turn on is absent here, and its absence should be stated plainly rather than passed over. Ta Prohm's date is not contested by anyone in this dispute: the foundation stele is on the site, it is dated, the style is the securely-known Bayon-period idiom of Jayavarman VII, and the advocates want the twelfth-century date — a later temple would only strengthen them. So the usual mechanisms of this group — usurpation, renovation read as foundation, reused footings, circular stylistic dating — have nothing to do here. Three other things would have to hold.

(a) The lobes are anatomy, not ornament. Everything rests on this. Remove the row from the back and no one has ever looked at the remaining animal and thought of a dinosaur.

(b) The intended referent is a stegosaur specifically, not a beast of the local forest or of the local mythology. A roundel animal at Ta Prohm may be a deer or a monkey; it may equally be a garuda, a naga or a composite. The argument needs this one to be zoological.

(c) The depiction derives from observation rather than from imagination, hearsay or bones. This condition is the one advocates most often skip, and it is genuinely separable from the first two. An artist may carve a plated beast because he saw one; because he heard of one; because he assembled one out of the pieces of others; or, as Glen Kuban notes, because he or someone before him saw fossils — several stegosaur genera are known from the Jurassic of China, Huayangosaurus, Tuojiangosaurus, Chungkingosaurus, Chialingosaurus, Wuerhosaurus, and Chinese material travelled. Only the first of the four supports the argument.⁴

One thing is not a condition, and this wiki will not use it as one. That non-avian dinosaurs are dated tens of millions of years before any human being is a conclusion the young-earth frame contests directly and at length; to invoke it here as the reason the carving cannot depict a living animal would settle by assumption exactly what the argument was brought to test. The extinction date is adjudicated on radiometric and stratigraphic evidence, elsewhere and on its own merits. On this page the question is what is on the stone.

Adversarial assessment: do the conditions hold?

The same lobes appear on animals nobody claims are dinosaurs. This is the central fact and it is not in dispute between the parties; only its meaning is. Within the Ta Prohm reliefs, ornamentation closely matching the disputed row has been identified around a bird and around what appears to be a water buffalo, and Scott Burnett — an anthropologist who examined the pilaster and the surrounding monuments of the Angkor Archaeological Park in person — found that in the vertical column of roundels of which the animal is one, "numerous figures above and below contain dorsal or other peripheral ornamentation, including human figures near the top of the column." Lobes behind a human head are not plates. If a row of lobes at this relief and in this position is a decorative or vegetal convention across the series, then the burden on condition (a) is not to show that these lobes are carved with care — they are — but to show why these alone are the animal. Woetzel's millimetres establish that the carver worked deliberately; they do not establish what he was working at, because the comparanda that would settle it are the neighbouring roundels, and there the same forms attach to a buffalo, a bird and a man.⁵

Burnett found the same animal without the lobes. He reports a further carving in the vicinity showing a creature of the same morphology — the same body, the same head, the same stance — and no dorsal row at all. If the plated and unplated beasts are one animal, the row is not part of it. This is the kind of evidence the dispute needed and had been missing: not an argument about what lobes usually mean, but a control specimen.⁶

Subtract the row and nothing stegosaurian is left. The animal has a short neck; a wide snout; a large head bearing two prominent structures usually read as horns or ear-flaps; forelimbs and hindlimbs of about the same length; and a tail carried low, close to the ground. A stegosaur has a long neck, a strikingly small and unornamented head, hindlimbs conspicuously longer than the forelimbs, and a tail held clear of the ground and ending in the four spikes of the thagomizer — the most distinctive rear end in the dinosaur record, and absent here. The plates themselves are wrong even taken as plates: a stegosaur's are numerous, staggered in a double row, pointed, and largest over the hips, where these are a single line of rounded lobes of near-uniform size. What is left once the row is set aside fits, in the judgements variously offered, a rhinoceros, a boar, a chameleon or horned lizard, a water buffalo, a pangolin — Alison Carter's suggestion, and a good one, since the pangolin is a Cambodian animal whose overlapping scales give exactly this ridged profile — or a creature of no zoological species at all.⁷

Condition (b) runs into what the temple actually is. Advocates treat the roundel series as a catalogue of local fauna, and it partly is — monkeys, deer, birds, buffalo are all there. But garuda, naga, hamsa and kala are equally there, some of the roundels carry divinities as riders, and the line between the observed and the mythological is not one Khmer temple iconography draws for us. Burnett's summary of the methodological point is the fair one: images at the monument "simply cannot all be interpreted as literal, informational placards representing local fauna," and reading art across eight centuries and a foreign iconographic system, out of its context, is a hazardous business.⁸

The rescues are unconstrained. Where the anatomy fails, the developed version supplies a hypothesis for each failure separately. The head is too large: it is muzzled, and the odd triangular device along the jaw is the muzzle. The thagomizer is missing: it was removed by the animal's keepers, "the same way that we might defang a captive snake or declaw a pet tiger." Each is possible. Neither is constrained by anything at the carving, and together they convert the argument's own diagnostic criteria into things that need not be present — which is to say that on this construction no observable feature of the relief could count against the identification. The auxiliary that carries the most weight, domestication, is also the one for which no independent trace exists anywhere in Khmer records, art or archaeology.⁹

The Chinese-dragon channel does not reach. The supporting suggestion that the Khmer might have learned of tamed dragons through Chinese contact is usually attached to Zhou Daguan's embassy, which reached Angkor in 1296 and left in 1297. That is some hundred and ten years after Ta Prohm's dedication. Whatever the mission attests, it cannot be the source of a carving already a century old.¹⁰

The hoax suggestion is set aside, not used. The relief is lighter in tone than the carvings around it, and because the temple is a much-used filming location it has been proposed — by Riley Black in Smithsonian, among others — that the image is modern mischief. The proposal is honest speculation and it is stated as such ("rumors that it was created recently"). It is also the weakest club in the skeptical bag: lightening is what repeated handling, cleaning and mould-taking produce, Woetzel reports early photographic documentation of the pilaster from before the modern cleaning, and Patton has pointed to surviving patina. This page does not rest a gram of weight on the hoax reading. The argument fails while granting the carving to be entirely authentic.¹¹

What the argument would prove if it worked

Worth stating, because it is rarely stated by either side. A stegosaur seen alive in or shortly before the twelfth century AD is not evidence about the world before the Flood. It is evidence about the world after it — a claim of post-Flood survival, and on the ark model, of an animal that came off the ark and persisted some four thousand years in mainland Southeast Asia leaving no bones, no other unambiguous depiction, and, on the developed version, no record of its domestication in the most bureaucratically documented empire in the region. The relevant neighbour on this timeline is therefore the ark's fauna and the question of what a single point of survival predicts for the distribution of animals afterwards, not the antediluvian-technology arguments this group otherwise collects.¹²

Assessment

Weak — as the claim that the Ta Prohm roundel depicts a stegosaur observed from life, and so attests dinosaur–human coexistence.

The concessions are real and are the reason this is a page rather than a dismissal. The resemblance is genuine, and the first to say so in print were guidebook authors with no stake in the question, one of them a distinguished epigraphist of Angkor. The developed version of the argument is field research: Woetzel went to the pilaster and measured it, and his finding that the lobes are cut two and a half times deeper than the leaf work at this monument is, so far as anything here shows, correct. Mocking the identification — the standard response — is not an answer to it, and the reflex objection from the extinction date is not one this wiki will use, since that date is precisely what the young-earth frame disputes and it has to be argued, not assumed.

The reading fails on the stone. The lobes that make the animal a dinosaur are a form that recurs in the same column of roundels around a bird, a buffalo and a human head, where no one reads them as bone; a near-identical animal has been photographed nearby without them; and the body they sit on has the wrong neck, the wrong snout, the wrong head, the wrong limb proportions, the wrong tail and no thagomizer. Deliberate carving establishes that the artist meant something by the row; it cannot establish that he meant a skeleton, and the neighbouring roundels are the evidence that decides, not the calipers. What holds the identification together after that is a chain of auxiliary hypotheses — a muzzle to excuse the head, a de-spiking to excuse the tail, a domestication to excuse both — each unconstrained by anything at the site, and jointly amounting to a rule that no feature of the carving could ever tell against the claim. Even granting the identification entire, condition (c) is still unmet: depiction is not observation, and a plated beast could be reached from fossil bones, from hearsay, or from the same imagination that produced the garudas and nagas a few medallions away. And granting all of it would establish a twelfth-century AD survival, not a pre-Flood world. There is a real object here and a real question, which is what separates this from the arguments in this group with nothing physical in them. The object answers the question the other way.

Sources