A Century-Old Skull From the Rock That Built the Sphinx Turns Out to Be a New Species of Crocodilian
CT scans of a skull found in the 1920s show it belonged to an unknown gavial-like animal that swam in Egypt's seas about 45 million years ago.
A fossil skull collected nearly a century ago has been recognised as an entirely new species. An international team has named it *Herugavialis cairensis*, a long-snouted, gavial-like crocodilian that lived in shallow seas around 45 million years ago, in a study published on October 7 in *Royal Society Open Science*.
A skull with a Sphinx connection
The fossils came from the Mokattam Formation near Cairo, the same limestone that ancient Egyptians quarried for the Great Sphinx. When they were dug up in the 1920s, including a nearly complete skull, they were assigned to *Tomistoma*, the genus of the living false gharial.
CT scanning revealed enough differences in the skull's anatomy for the researchers, led by Paul Burke of the Swedish Museum of Natural History and Philip Mannion of University College London, to place it in a new genus.
- Age: about 45 million years (sources vary slightly)
- Lifestyle: slender snout and sharp teeth suggest it hunted fish
- Name: "Heru" for the Egyptian god, plus a term for gavials, and "cairensis" for Cairo
- A coincidence: the snout tip is missing, much like the Sphinx's nose
"We decided to name the new crocodile after the Egyptian god Heru." — Philip Mannion
Why it matters
The find shows how rich the ancient Mediterranean's crocodile life was. Burke noted the region hosted a high diversity of crocodiles, including gavials, and other gavial species shared these seas. Crocodiles later disappeared from the area around six million years ago.
Today only two gavial species survive, in South and Southeast Asia. Re-examining old museum specimens with modern scanning, as this study did, can still turn up surprises.
