Reptiles and amphibians
New crocodile species found in the Sphinx’s limestone
Fossils recovered a century ago from the rock used to build the Great Sphinx belong to a long-snouted crocodile species new to science, researchers say.
Reported by Mongabay · · 1 min read
About 45 million years ago, a long-snouted crocodile hunted in a warm, shallow sea in what is now northern Egypt. Its bones settled into the limestone that ancient Egyptians would later cut and carve into the Great Sphinx. A century after the fossils were first dug up, researchers say the animal belongs to a species new to science.
The extinct reptile, named Herugavialis cairensis, is described in a study in Royal Society Open Science. Like the Sphinx, the fossil is missing the tip of its nose. Philip Mannion, a palaeontologist at University College London who co-led the study, said the team named it after the Egyptian god Heru, who may have inspired the monument.
The fossils, including a nearly complete skull, were found in the 1920s in Egypt’s Mokattam Formation. At the time scientists placed them in Tomistoma, the genus of the living false gharial, because the two looked alike. An international team from the UK, Sweden, Germany and Egypt, led by Paul Burke of the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, looked at them again with modern tools. CT scans of the skull showed several features that set the fossil apart from the false gharial.
Herugavialis belongs to the gavials, a group of long-snouted crocodilians. Fossils show that gavials once lived almost everywhere in the world, and many species swam in shallow seas. Only two survive today, both in fresh water.
