Earth
New croc relative Herugavialis found in Sphinx rock
A fossil crocodilian discovered in the same Egyptian limestone used to build the Great Sphinx has been identified as a new genus of gavial, missing its snout tip like its famous stone neighbor.
The Great Sphinx of Giza is not the only stony face in the area missing its nose. A 45-million-year-old fossil crocodilian excavated from the same limestone formation that ancient Egyptians used to carve the Sphinx also has a broken snout. But the specimen is intact enough for scientists to name it a new branch of the gavial family tree.
The research, reported October 7 in Royal Society Open Science, reclassifies a skull first described by German researchers in 1927. That team had identified the fossil as an extinct species of Tomistoma, a genus that today survives as a single species in Southeast Asia. More recent evolutionary studies had suggested that classification was wrong.
In 2023, paleontologist Paul Burke, then a doctoral student at University College London, traveled to Germany to examine the fossil closely. Using 3-D X-ray methods, Burke and colleagues measured the skull's brain and nasal cavities.
"As we've advanced in the last 100 years, we've got so many new methodologies we could implement to figure out what kind of species this fossil is," said Burke, now at the Sweden Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, as reported by Science News.
Comparing their measurements with living and fossil gavials, the team found this purported Egyptian Tomistoma was actually an undescribed gavial genus. They named it Herugavialis cairensis, after the Egyptian god Heru (Horus), who has been associated with the Great Sphinx. Coincidentally, the Herugavialis skull is missing the end of its snout, sharing that trait with its noseless statue neighbor.
"So many species are found from the same [geologic] formation," Burke said, including fish, sharks and mammals. "But this is the first one with the name associated with the Sphinx."
Today, gavials live only in freshwater environments, with two species in tropical Asia. Tens of millions of years ago, however, these slender-snouted, fish-eating reptiles also inhabited nearshore saltwater. Herugavialis appears to have been a coastal predator when the ancient Tethys Ocean covered northern Egypt.
Khalafallah Salih, a paleontologist at Al Neelain University in Khartoum, Sudan, said the finding supports the idea that gavial evolution in Africa was more complex than thought. Herugavialis does not appear closely related to other known gavial-type crocodilians in Africa or the Mediterranean. It seems to have branched off early in the lineage.
Burke noted that gavials barely breach the public consciousness compared to alligators and crocodiles.
"They're still alive today and they're endangered," he said. "So, we should know about them and their long history."
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