Every now and then, people on the Internet, bless their hearts, believe they’ve found evidence of time travel in an old  painting . This happens surprisingly often, and always with a simple explanation that doesn’t require time travel to be real, and the time travelers themselves to be absolute poseurs who insist on posing for portraits at their old vacation destination.

In a fun new twist on the genre, people seem to believe that dinosaurs lived alongside humans 500 years ago (yes, like in   The Flintstones  ) because of a painting by “Peter Bruce Gale” in 1562. In a typical post, Instagram user historyunreal wrote: “[It’s] a painting by Peter Bruce Gale in 1562… 300 years before we supposedly knew anything about dinosaurs.”

ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external websites.

So, despite no other evidence coming to light, such as people writing “isn’t it weird how we ride   Brachiosaurus   like a big lizard horse?”, is this evidence that   The Flintstones   was in fact a documentary? No.

First, “Peter Bruce Gale” is not the artist of the painting, there is no reference to him outside of this particular conspiracy theory. The artist of this painting –   The Suicide of Saul   –   is the Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It depicts events described in the Bible   –   the suicide of King Saul after his defeat by the Philistines at Mount Gilboa.

If dinosaurs were really there, he would probably have made that the focus. Image credit: Kunsthistorisches Muѕeum Wien (Public Domain)

It was indeed painted in 1562 and shows some weird little guys riding in the background. But they’re not dinosaurs. As many posts have pointed out, this is more likely a case of “Pieter’s never seen a camel” than dinosaurs traveling through time, or a bunch of humans living alongside them all along. Camels are actually mentioned in reference to King Saul in the Bible, and it’s likely that he tried to include them in the background.

Just as lions in medieval European  paintings were notoriously bad, drawings of camels suffered from the same lack of a seated model (as well as stylistic choices on the part of artists who had seen the creatures).