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Missing snout links new croc species to the Great Sphinx
The 45-million-year-old gavial *Herugavialis cairensis* was hiding in the Sphinx's own bedrock.
Here's the scale: the Great Sphinx stood for roughly 4,500 years before the fossil crocodile *Herugavialis cairensis* got its formal species name this week.
The Great Sphinx is missing its nose. The fossil skull, pulled from the same bedrock, is missing the tip of its snout. The coincidence earned the 45-million-year-old reptile the name *Herugavialis cairensis*, after the Egyptian god Heru, Popular Science reports.
A paper detailing the find appears today in the journal *Royal Society Open Science*. Popular Science notes the Sphinx, 66 feet high with a lion's body and human head, was likely carved during the reign of Khafre between 2613 and 2494 B.C. The fossil crocodile is far older. It dates from the Eocene, about 45 million years ago, when shallow marine environments covered the region.
*Herugavialis cairensis* is a gavial, a group of crocodiles with long, thin snouts. Only two living gavial species remain, found today on the Indian subcontinent and in Southeast Asia. The magazine reports the skull was recovered from Egypt's Mokattam Formation during the 1920s. Scientists first believed it was a false gharial. Advances in scanning technology let paleontologists look inside the fossil and see the missing snout tip.
Study co-author Philip Mannion, an evolutionary biologist at University College London, said in a statement that the missing tip of the snout combined with the Sphinx's famously missing nose led to the name. Paul Burke, a paleontologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, said the Mediterranean region hosted a high diversity of gavials over the last 50 million years. All crocodiles vanished from the region about 6 million years ago when the sea largely dried up, according to the outlet.
The coincidence of the two missing pieces, the Sphinx's nose and the crocodile's snout, is the kind of symmetry that brings deep time into the present. The published study confirms *Herugavialis cairensis* as a new species, painting a picture of an ancient Egypt under shallow seas where gavial crocodiles swam 40 million years before the pyramids.
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