The stone that built the Sphinx hid a 45-million-year-old secret — a crocodile missing its nose

Forty-five million years before anyone carved a Sphinx, a shallow sea covered what is now Egypt — and a crocodile swam through it. Scientists have now given it a name: Herugavialis cairensis, after Heru, or Horus, the Egyptian god tied to the mythical creature the Sphinx became. The fossils come from the Mokattam limestone bed, the very stone ancient Egyptians quarried for the Sphinx and the pyramids at Giza. And one of the key specimens, a nearly complete skull first dug up in the 1920s, is missing the tip of its snout — just like the Sphinx is missing its nose. The new species is one of six gharials — the long-snouted crocodile family — found in the Mediterranean between 66 and 23 million years ago; today only two gharial species survive, in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. The study was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.