‘New’ 2,000-Year-Old Geoglyph Spotted In Nazca Desert

Researchers have identified a ‘new’ geoglyph shaped like a mythical beast among the famous Nazca Lines in Peru.

There are more than 700 enormous drawings stretching over a 50-mile wide area in the Nazca desert with the gigantic images ranging from simple lines to creatures including hummingbirds, spiders and sharks.

The latest discovery measures a whopping 30m long and is shaped like a monster with spotted markings, lots of legs and a long tongue poking out.

A sketch of the monster geoglyph’s outline (Yamagata University)

First spotted by a pilot in 1939, the legendary Peruvian drawings are thought to be thousands of years old, having been created by the ancient Nazca people between the 1st and 6th centuries.

While it’s often stated that the mysterious drawings can only be seen from the air, they are in fact visible from the surrounding foothills.

The area containing the Nazca Lines was designated a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1994.

The famous condor drawing from the Nazca Lines (Gilles Barbier / imageBROKER/REX/Shutterstock)

Japanese scientists from Yamagata University spotted the ‘monster’ geoglyph this year in Pampa de Majuelos in the Nazca desert.

The huge drawing was made by removing surface stones of darker colour to expose underlying whitish ground and piling up the removed stones to create the outline of the create, explain the researchers.

In 2011, the researchers discovered another ‘new’ geoglyph thought to depict a scene of decapitation

Image credit: Yamagata University