The Sphinx Crocodile: A Skull Misfiled for 100 Years | Unfilmable Ep. 12

The Great Sphinx is missing the tip of its nose — and so is a crocodile skull dug from the very same rock.

In the 1920s, fossil hunters in northeastern Egypt pulled a nearly complete crocodile skull from limestone laid down forty-five million years ago, when the whole region was a shallow sea.

For nearly a century it sat mislabelled — filed away as a false gharial, a living crocodile from Southeast Asia — because on the outside, it looked the part.

And here's the part nobody expected: when scientists CT-scanned the skull, they found raised rims around the eye sockets — a feature the false gharial doesn't have at all.

That one difference was enough. The skull belonged to a species nobody had ever named: Herugavialis cairensis — named for Heru, the falcon-headed god said to inspire the Sphinx, and for Cairo, the city nearby.

It hunted in a warm, shallow sea — and it helps solve a puzzle: today's gavials live only in freshwater rivers, yet their fossil cousins once swam the world's oceans.

Some of those ancient gavials could cross oceans and live in saltwater — an ability their living relatives have lost.

Crocodiles vanished from the Mediterranean six million years ago, when the sea nearly dried up — and they never came back. One skull, misfiled for a century, rewrote a whole family tree.

Source: Burke et al., Royal Society Open Science, reported October 30, 2026 (The Conversation, Philip Mannion, University College London; lead author Paul Burke, Swedish Museum of Natural History). Fossil skull collected in the 1920s from the Mokattam Formation, Egypt; first described in 1927 as Tomistoma; now housed at the State Museum of Natural History, Stuttgart.

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