“Now scientifically this carving should not exist,” a YouTube explorer has claimed after visiting Angkor Wat in Cambodia where a carving of a ‘dinosaur’ has sparked time travel conspiracy theories
Ta Prohm, Angkor Wat, Cambodia has led to several conspiracy theories (Image: Getty Images)
A mysterious carving of what appears to be a dinosaur found etched into an ancient and the world’s largest religious site has blown wild theories wide open.
Some 65 million years passed between an asteroid smashing into Earth, wiping dinosaurs out completely and the first humans to evolve and walk the planet.
It’s scientifically impossible therefore, for anyone to have been knocking around – even the earliest of cavemen – to catch a glimpse of a stegosaurus and etch its image anywhere, let alone Angkor Wat, Cambodia.
Ta Prohm is one of the temples that make up the largest religious complex in the world, built for Hinduism over 28 years in the 12th century but taken over by Buddhists to practice their faith.
A stegosaurus or a boar surrounded by leaves? (Image: Getty)
Centuries old art can be seen scrawled all over walls and sculptures but there’s one in particular that has sparked conspiracy theories that challenge what we know of dinosaurs and time.
YouTube explorer Praveen Mohan visited the site in Cambodia to claim time travelling sculptors must be the only logical explanation.
“We don’t have any animals with back plates today, they became extinct millions of years ago. Now scientifically this carving should not exist.”
Some believe the carving points towards a humans working with dinosaurs (Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
“This is not a fossil or a skeleton, this is complete with all the details: skin, tail, flesh and everything so the sculptor must have seen a dinosaur in real life.
“Some may argue that ancient builders must have re-created this by putting together fossils, bones and reconstructing the animal but this is very, very hard to do, even today this is not easy and requires advanced scientific knowledge.
“Many experts have tried to debunk this because it flies not only in the face of mainstream science but also goes against mainstream history and archaeology.”
Creationists argue this carving proves their theory of the world only being a few thousand years old and dinosaurs must have co-existed with humans. They claim dinosaurs instead only went extinct a few centuries ago and were in fact labelled dragons.
Carvings of trees growing from the temple towers appear to be further evidence of time travel (Image: Getty Images)
An article in UFO Sightings Footage claims the carving is like the Ica stone of Peru.
It reads: “The Ica stones are more proof that humans and dinosaurs did actually co-exist together and humans maybe played a part in their eventual demise.”
Praveeen, however, prefers a different explanation which remains in line with evidence of the big bang, pre-historic fossils and evolution.
He said: “In Hinduism there is a lot of evidence of time travel, right? A lot of scriptures talk about time travel. So is it possible that the sculptors were able to time travelling and they were able to carve a dinosaur?
For Praveen at least, the carving is undeniably of a stegosaurus (Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
“They went into the past, saw a dinosaur, came back and carved this dinosaur.”
Praveen added that not only is there evidence at Ta Prohm of time travel into the past, but the future too, with carvings of temples being reclaimed by nature as became the case centuries later.
“If the sculptors were capable of going into the past did they also go into the future 1,000 years ago? Look the trees taking over the temples.”
Brian Switek writing for Smithsonian magazine said there were “substantial problems” with the theory and suggests that rather than plate on the creature’s back, they’re just leaves decorating a boar or rhino picture.