Entangled Petrified Man and Giant Serpent of the Dakota Badlands

The Entangled Petrified Man and Giant Serpent of the Dakota Badlands were alleged petrified remains of an ancient human being coiled by a gigantic snake that had been claimed to have been excavated by G. G. Greene, a resident of Mankato, Minnesota, while vacationing in the Badlands of the Dakotas in June 1905. No further information has been found regarding the claim at this time.

Press Coverage

• "PETRIFIED MAN Found Locked in Death Grapple With a Petrified Snake", Ohio County News (Hartford, KY): 1, 26 July 1905, https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/186576644/ 
  

  (Le Sueur (Minn.) Cor. St. Paul Pioneer Press)

  G. G. Green, of Mankota, the suave and gentlemanly demonstrator for one of the standard typewriting machines, while in Le Sueur to-day on business, was delighted to receive notice of the arrival in Makato of shipment of his remarkable prehistoric relic lately exhumed by his own hands from the Bad Lands of Dakota.

  Mr. Greene is an enthusiastic antiquarian and spent his June vacation in the Bad Lands, that wonderful natural museum of the marvels of the past, and while there, was fortunate enough to find this relic which has just arrived in Makato. It consists of the perfectly petrified remains of a monstrous serpent and a prehistoric cave-dweller, twined together in a death struggle. The situation in which the relic was found leaves no doubt but that ages ago these representatives of the highest and lowest orders of animal life then existing were locked together in a life and death combat, and while thus engaged they come near to the top of a bank of loose earth which leaved with them, carry them down into the morass beneath, together with amass of earth and rock under which the man, and serpent were buried millions of years ago.

  The body of the serpent, which was about five inches in diameter at the thickest portion, is wrapped again and again around the body of the man, and its sharp, savage teeth are embedded in the left forearm of its antagonist which the man had thrown forward with the evident purpose of protecting his face, at the same time that his sinewy right arm drove a dagger of flint deep into the serpent's skull, directly between its eyes. The left band of the man in addition to being thrown out as a guard to his face, clutches a stone hammer, with which it would appear he bad struck the serpent before he was enwrapped in its folds, for the reptiles skull is somewhat indented just above its right eye. The protuberance of the skull above the eye, for its protection, is crushed down.

  The body of the man was naked, except for a short garment of fur about the loins, and he has a necklace of the terrible claws of some animal like the polar bear of to-day.

  A touching feature of the wonderful petrification is that the last time the reptile threw one of its powerful coils around the struggling cave-dweller it inclosed within the coil, pressed firmly against the upper portion of the man's right leg, a large tuft of grass, which was held tightly in this situation and torn roots and all from the earth, and that imbedded in the center of the tuft and as perfectly petrified as any other portion of the relic, is a ground bird's nest, the devoted mother bird still valiantly holding her position, and two of the eggs, still unbroken, showing plainly through the meshes of the upper portion of the nest and the petrified grass around it.