A New Crocodile Named After the Sphinx, and a Distant Gharial Cousin

The Great Sphinx of Giza is famous for many things, and one of them is something it no longer has: the tip of its nose. Now a fossil crocodile pulled from the very same rock has turned out to share that strange feature, and scientists have given it a name to match.

The animal is called Herugavialis cairensis. It was a long-snouted crocodile that swam in a warm, shallow sea over what is now Cairo roughly 45 million years ago. And for readers in India, it has a surprising connection: it belongs to the same family tree as the gharial of the Chambal and Ganga rivers.

Who announced it?

The study was published in October 2026 in the journal Royal Society Open Science. It was led by Dr Paul Burke, a researcher at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, and co-led by Professor Philip Mannion of University College London (UCL), with colleagues from Germany and Egypt. The Swedish museum announced the find in a press release on 6 October 2026, and on 30 October 2026 Professor Mannion explained the work in an article for The Conversation, republished by UCL.

A fossil that hid in plain sight for a century

This is not a fossil that was dug up last month. In the 1920s, several crocodile fossils, including a nearly complete skull, were collected at Gebel Mokattam, a range of hills east of Cairo. In 1927 they were described as a species of Tomistoma, because they looked superficially like the living false gharial, Tomistoma schlegelii, of Southeast Asia. The species became known as Tomistoma cairense.

For about a hundred years, that label stuck. But palaeontologists have increasingly suspected that many old fossils lumped into Tomistoma do not actually belong there. So the team went back to the original skull and related specimens and studied them again, this time with modern tools.

What the CT scans revealed

Using CT scanning, the researchers were able to look inside the skull, including the space that once held the brain and sensory organs. They found a series of anatomical differences from the false gharial. The most striking is that the eye sockets have raised rims, giving the animal what the paper calls "telescoped" orbits. Tomistoma does not have this feature.

The team also ran a phylogenetic analysis, a method that builds a family tree from shared physical traits. The Egyptian crocodile did not group with the false gharial, nor with other gavial fossils from the Mediterranean region. That was enough to show it needed a new genus of its own.

Why it is named after the Sphinx

The rock that held the fossil is the Mokattam Formation, a limestone made largely of the shells of tiny sea creatures, formed when this part of Egypt lay under a shallow sea. The same formation was quarried by ancient Egyptians and supplied stone for the Giza pyramids, much of historic Cairo and, about 4,500 years ago, the Great Sphinx itself.

The connection did not end there. The fossil skull is missing the tip of its snout, just as the Sphinx is missing its nose. "Given this coincidence with the famously missing nose of the Great Sphinx, we decided to name the new crocodile after the Egyptian god Heru, who was possibly the inspiration for this iconic monument," Professor Mannion said in the press release.

So the name breaks down neatly. Heru (also known as Horus) is the falcon-headed god often linked to the Sphinx. The ending -gavialis points to its relationship with Gavialis gangeticus, India's gharial. And cairensis simply means "from Cairo".

A sea full of crocodiles

Herugavialis was not alone. According to the researchers, the shallow seas around ancient Egypt were home to at least two other kinds of gavial at roughly the same time. "Throughout much of the last 50 million years, the Mediterranean region hosted a high diversity of crocodiles, including gavials," Dr Burke said.

That is remarkable because today's gavials cannot cope with seawater. Yet the fossil record shows the group goes back about 80 million years, to the age of dinosaurs, with more than 40 known species spread across the globe. In earlier work, Mannion's group found signs of a marine lifestyle in some fossil gavials, similar to the thickened inner-ear walls seen in other ocean-going crocodile relatives that had to cope with pressure at depth. In other words, many ancient gavials were sea travellers, which helps explain how the family spread across continents separated by oceans.

How the Mediterranean lost its crocodiles

The study also traces a long rise and fall. The researchers suggest gavial diversity in the Mediterranean dropped in the Late Eocene and Oligocene, possibly because global cooling and falling sea levels shrank their shallow-sea habitat. A warmer spell in the Miocene may have allowed a rebound.

Then, about 6 million years ago, crocodiles vanished from the region entirely. That timing matches the Messinian Salinity Crisis, when the Mediterranean was cut off from the Atlantic and largely dried up, its water growing ever saltier. Crocodiles never returned. Mannion notes that the Mediterranean is still saltier than the open ocean today, and that the living gavials, having lost their saltwater adaptations, could not survive there anyway. He argues that rapid swings in temperature, sea level and dryness, all features of today's climate crisis, can shape life for millions of years.

The Indian connection

Only two gavials survive today, and both live far from Egypt in fresh water: the false gharial in Southeast Asia and the gharial of the Indian subcontinent. The gharial gets its name from the Hindi word ghara, an earthen pot, after the knob on the snout of adult males. Fossil gharial remains have been found in India's Sivalik Hills, and gharials appear on Indus Valley seals around 4,000 years old. In Hindu tradition, the gharial is the vehicle of the river goddess Ganga.

The modern species is in serious trouble. It has been listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2007 and survives in only a small fraction of its historical range, with the National Chambal Sanctuary among its strongholds.

Why this matters

Herugavialis is a reminder that museum drawers can hold discoveries as exciting as any new dig. A skull collected a century ago, re-examined with modern scanners, has added a new branch to the family tree of India's gharial, and offered a clear lesson from deep time: when seas and climates change fast, even the most successful animals can disappear from entire regions for good.