Stegosaurus of Angkor Wat

Tourists come to Cambodia every year for the sole purpose of visiting the temples at Angkor. This magnificent series of temples, carved out of the jungle in the 12th and 13th centuries by Khmer devaraja, is still the largest group of religious complexes ever created. Yet most visitors miss one of its more intriguing mysteries.

At Ta Prohm, near Angkor Wat and built by the epic builder king Jayavarman VII in the late 1100s, a small carving on a crumbling temple wall seems to show a dinosaur - a stegosaurus, to be exact. The hand-sized carving can be found in a quiet corner of the complex, a stone temple engulfed in jungle vegetation where the roots of centuries-old banyan trees snake through broken walls.

Several different theories have been advanced to explain its presence. Some say that the ancient Khmers could have unearthed a fossil and figured out what kind of creature it belonged to.

Or maybe the carving is evidence that dinosaurs really did live on until much later than previously thought. (Creationists would certainly like to believe so.) Perhaps here in the humid, ancient jungles of Southeast Asia, where the climate has remained largely unchanged since the dinosaurs' days, giant reptiles lived on well into the human era - long enough to persist in the Khmer folk-memory. If only these walls could talk, we might have a clue.