A fossil crocodile from Cairo's limestone is a species of its own
Researchers renamed a 45-million-year-old gavial from the same rock as the Great Sphinx after CT scans showed it was not the false gharial it had been called.
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A crocodile skull collected near Cairo in the 1920s has been given its own genus. Smithsonian Magazine reported on October 9, 2026, on a paper published two days earlier in Royal Society Open Science.
The fossil came from the Mokattam Formation east of Cairo, a marine limestone about 45 million years old. That is the same stone the Great Sphinx and the pyramids at Giza were carved from. The skull, about 18 inches long, is missing the tip of its snout. The Sphinx is missing the tip of its nose. The team, including researchers in Britain, Sweden, Germany, and Egypt, named the animal Herugavialis cairensis, after Heru, the god also known as Horus, whom some texts link to the Sphinx.
For decades the bones were filed under Tomistoma, the false gharial. Micro-CT scans found differences, including telescoped, raised orbits. It was a gavial, a fish-eater with a long thin snout, and it did not cluster with the living false gharial or with some other fossil gavials from the Mediterranean. Co-author Philip Mannion, of University College London, said the shared stone and the missing nose made the name feel right. The paper revises a label on a museum skull. It does not add a living animal to the Nile.
For the classroom
Smithsonian Magazine reported on October 9, 2026, that scientists studied an old crocodile skull found near Cairo about 100 years ago. The rock it came from is the same kind of limestone that was carved into the Great Sphinx. The skull is about 45 million years old, and the tip of its snout is missing, a little like the Sphinx missing the tip of its nose. For a long time people thought the fossil belonged with the false gharial. New scans showed it is different. The team named it Herugavialis cairensis, after an Egyptian god also called Horus. It was a fish-eating crocodile with a long thin snout.
- How can a scan of an old skull tell scientists it is a new kind of animal?
- Why did the researchers connect this fossil with the Sphinx?
- What is a gharial, and how is its snout different from other crocodiles?
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