A ‘water panther’ pictogram
Some authors cite a petroglyph from Big Sandy River (Oregon, USA), in which there is an image of what is claimed to be a stegosaurus. Indigenous tradition mentions a ‘water-panther’, an animal with a cat-like face and a saw-tooth back that inhabited streams and lakes. According to Vine Deloria, a Native American writer, there are numerous pictographs of the ‘water-panther’, warning passers-by of the danger.
The authors who use this as evidence that humans and dinosaurs once co-existed (and erhaps still co-exist) gennerally fail to show a reproduction of the petroglyph, making the claim impossible to evaluate. This is the sort of claim that tends to appear in lists of anomalies without authority, a technique commonly found among ‘fringe’ authors. Like so much of this material, it is simply repeated from source to source. The fear is that such fanciful stories develop into factoids. However, it is possible to find images of ‘water panthers’. As can be seen from the example reproduced here, they resemble Stegosaurs in only superficial ways.
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