The Sphinx's own stone hid a crocodile: a 45-million-year-old fossil finally gets its name

The skull sat in a museum for a century. Dug in the 1920s from Egypt's Mokattam Formation — the same rock the Great Sphinx of Giza was carved from — it was filed away as a known crocodile species. Now researchers from the UK, Sweden, Germany and Egypt have CT-scanned inside it and found features no one had seen, including a raised ridge around the eyes. Their verdict, published in Royal Society Open Science: it is a species new to science, Herugavialis cairensis, a long-snouted, fish-eating gavial that swam in the Mediterranean about 45 million years ago, when the sea covered what is now desert and quarry stone.