New Crocodile Found in the Rock of the Great Sphinx

The Great Sphinx of Giza is famous for its missing nose. Now a fossil from the very same rock formation turns out to share the flaw. And for a century, nobody realized this skull belonged to an animal science had never named.

A skull hiding in plain sight

In the 1920s, collectors in Egypt found several fossils of a long-snouted crocodile relative, including a nearly complete skull. A 1927 study by Lorenz Müller identified them as the living species Tomistoma schlegelii. The skull now sits in the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart.

A team led by Dr Paul Burke, who did the work at UCL Earth Sciences and now works at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, took a fresh look. They used CT (computed tomography) scanning to see inside the skull. The scans revealed features that set it apart from Tomistoma, including a raised ridge around the eyes. The study, published in Royal Society Open Science, names it a new extinct gavial: Herugavialis cairensis.

The Sphinx connection

The fossil comes from the Mokattam Formation, the same rock formation that people carved the Great Sphinx from more than 4,000 years ago. The skull is also missing the tip of its snout, just as the Sphinx is missing the tip of its nose. The team named the animal after the Egyptian god Heru, who may have inspired the Sphinx, according to UCL’s Professor Philip Mannion.

A 45-million-year-old coastal hunter

Herugavialis cairensis lived about 45 million years ago. At that time, the sea covered coastal Egypt, and this gavial hunted in shallow marine waters. It was not alone. At least two other gavial species lived in the same environment, which makes that ancient coastline a crowded place for long-snouted predators.

Sources

• UCL News: New crocodile species discovered in rocks used to build the Great Sphinx (7 October 2026)
• Burke et al., Royal Society Open Science (2026)