A 45-million-year-old crocodile gets its name — from the stone that built the Sphinx

A nearly complete skull unearthed near Cairo in the 1920s has finally earned its own genus: Herugavialis cairensis, named for the Egyptian god Heru, or Horus. Micro-CT scans showed the fossil — misclassified for a century as a relative of today's Southeast Asian false gharial — is a distinct long-snouted hunter that swam the shallow sea covering what is now northern Egypt 45 million years ago. The twist: the limestone holding the fossils is the same Mokattam rock the ancient Egyptians carved into the Great Sphinx — and both fossil and monument are missing the tip of the nose. Egyptian paleontologist Hesham Sallam of Mansoura University co-authored the study, published October 7 in Royal Society Open Science.