Scientists have discovered a new species of extinct crocodilian in rock used to build the Sphinx of Giza in Egypt. The animal is similar to the gharial (Gavialis gangeticus) found today in the rivers of North India.
“Gharials are a group of crocodiles characterized by their long, narrow snouts. Today, there are only two living species, Gavialis gangeticus and the so-called false gharial Tomistoma schlegelii, which live in South and Southeast Asia, respectively. However, fossil finds show that gharials previously had a distribution over almost the entire world for a period of more than 100 million years and that many species lived in shallow marine environments,” a statement by the Swedish National Museum of Natural History noted.
It added that in the 1920s, several fossils were found in the 45-million-year-old Mokattam Formation in Egypt, including a nearly complete skull. The fossils were thought to belong to the genus Tomistoma, but new analytical methods in paleontology give a different picture.
“Using computed tomography, the research team was able to examine the inside of the skull and identify several differences between the fossil from the Mokattam Formation and the genus Tomistoma, thereby establishing that it is a previously unknown species,” the statement read.
One detail in the relatively well-preserved skull particularly caught the researchers’ attention: the tip of the snout is missing.
“Given this similarity to the Sphinx, we named the new crocodile species Herugavialis cairensis, after the Egyptian god Heru, who may have inspired the famous monument,” says Paul Burke, researcher at the Swedish Museum of Natural History and the study’s first author.
Herugavialis was not the only crocodilian living in Egypt at this time. At least two other gharial species lived in the shallow marine environments that covered much of the region.
“The Mediterranean region has had a great diversity of crocodiles over the last 50 million years,” says Burke.
However, diversity has varied over time, seemingly in step with changes in global temperature and sea level. Ultimately, all crocodiles disappeared from the region around six million years ago.
The study was published in the Royal Society Open Science journal on October 7, 2026. It is an international collaboration between researchers in the UK, Sweden, Germany and Egypt and was led by Burke, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in Stockholm.
The paper is titled as Cranial anatomy of the Middle Eocene Egyptian crocodylian Herugavialis cairensis provides new insights into gavialoid diversity in the Mediterranean region.