The tip of its snout is missing. The same detail is seen in the Great Sphinx of Giza, whose nose disappeared in antiquity. The coincidence is unusual enough to give a name to a new species of crocodile that lived about 45 million years ago in the shallow sea that then covered northern Egypt.
Herugavialis cairensis was described from fossils from the Mokattam Formation near Cairo. The stone used for the Great Sphinx was quarried from the same limestone layers. The animal belonged to the group of long-snouted gharials - crocodiles whose narrow jaws are adapted for catching fish and other aquatic prey.
The skull waited almost a century for a new name
The fossil skull was discovered in the 1920s. In 1927, scientists identified it as a representative of the genus Tomistoma, to which the modern-day Malayan gharial also belongs. Almost a century later, an international team returned to the find with the help of computer tomography and detailed comparisons with other ancient and modern crocodiles.
The scan allowed them to examine not only the external outlines of the skull, but also its internal structures. Thus, the researchers established a combination of features that did not match the known species and genera. The result is a new genus and species, Herugavialis cairensis.
The study was led by Paul Burke of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and co-authored by Professor Philip Mannion of University College London. It was the missing tip of the snout that led scientists to name the crocodile Herugavialis, which is associated with the Egyptian god Heru, also known as Horus.
“Because of this coincidence with the famous missing nose of the Great Sphinx, we decided to name the new crocodile after the Egyptian god Heru“, says Professor Philip Mannion.Crocodiles in the ancient Mediterranean
Herugavialis was not the only gharial in the region. At the time it lived, the shallow seas of the ancient Mediterranean were home to at least two other species of the same group. Fossil finds show that gharials were once widespread almost all over the world, inhabiting not only rivers and lakes, but also coastal marine environments.
Today, only two species of gharials survive in Asia, both of which are threatened by hunting and habitat destruction. In Egypt, the only extant crocodile species is the Nile crocodile.
Crocodiles disappeared from the Mediterranean Sea about 6 million years ago. However, the new fossil brings back its much older image - not as a desert near ancient monuments, but as a warm, shallow sea in which a long-snouted crocodile hunted fish. The stone, which people later turned into the Sphinx, has preserved the trace of this forgotten kingdom.
Sources: btvnovinite.bg, phys.org, sciencenews.org