Archaeologists use the term serpopard to denote a cat with an exaggerated neck, a motif that appears occasionally on ancient Sumerian and Egyptian artifacts. The term combines the words serpent and leopard. The former is a reference to the snake-like neck, and the latter acknowledges that apart from the neck, the animal is one of the big cats. It doesn’t have a mane, so it is not a male lion, but it could be meant as a lioness. The significance of the elongated necks in these feline images is currently a mystery.
Serpopard images first enter the known archaeological record in the late fourth millennium BCE, on cylinder seals from the Sumerian city of Uruk (Moortgat 1935, 77–85). The most famous of these is one in the Louvre, which shows a series of pairs of serpopards with intertwined necks (Figure 1). Serpopards subsequently appear on Egyptian cosmetic palettes of the thirty-first century BCE, from the city of Nekhen (also known by its Greek name Hierakonpolis) in Upper Egypt (Quibell 1900; Quibell and Green 1902), including the Narmer Palette and the Two Dogs Palette (Figure 2). Serpopards then vanish from the known archaeological record for over a thousand years and reappear in the tomb of Ukhhotep II, an Egyptian official of the twentieth century BCE, who oversaw the city of Cusae. In the writing within his tomb, the hieroglyph that represents the name of Cusae is a male human figure standing on the backs of a pair of serpopards and holding their throats (Blackman 1915, 31, pl. XVII). Serpopards subsequently make appearances as protective figures on several Egyptian hippo tusk wands of the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BCE, carved amid other protective figures (Figure 3). Attending nurses used these wands to ward off evil during royal births (Quirke 2016, 392–394, 573–594).
Serpopards are clearly cats, but anti-evolution authors seem to have difficulty seeing them as such. Such authors frequently misidentify serpopards as sauropods, the herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks and tiny heads that include such familiar examples as Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus (once thought to be synonymous with Apatosaurus but now thought to be distinct; see Tschopp et al. 2015), Diplodocus, and Brachiosaurus. A few authors misidentify serpopards as Tanystropheus, a long-necked, non-dinosaurian reptile of the Triassic Period. These misidentifications are manifestations of the strong tendency among anti-evolution authors to see dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals where there aren’t any in ancient and medieval art. This tendency has been dubbed “dead varmint vision” (Senter 2013a). It is a frequent contributor to the so-called “evidence” that young-earth creationist (YEC) authors cite in support of their position: that God created the world about 6,000 years ago and created each kind of animal separately, as described in Genesis. YEC authors under the influence of dead varmint vision have misidentified numerous animals in ancient and medieval art and literature as dinosaurs. Such animals include snakes, birds, lions, giraffes, and imaginary sea monsters (Senter 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2018, 2019a, 2019b, 2024; Siebert 2013; Burnett 2019). YEC authors’ search for dinosaurs in ancient art and literature is part of an effort to marshal “evidence” of human coexistence with dinosaurs, which is meant to cast doubt on the separation of humans and dinosaurs by millions of years, which in turn is meant to cast doubt upon the passage of millions of years. In the case under discussion here, the great power of the dinosaur-colored glasses of dead varmint vision to influence perception is beautifully illustrated by its having influenced intelligent people with doctoral degrees to see cats as dinosaurs