Carved into Iranian stone thousands of years ago, a 14-centimeter figure depicts something that shouldn’t exist: a creature with the anatomically precise head and grasping arms of a praying mantis merged with the squatting legs of a human. The ancient petroglyph’s disturbing accuracy—matching specific details of local Empusa mantids that modern entomologists needed careful study to identify—raises unsettling questions about what prehistoric artists witnessed in the remote Teymareh region.
