Extinct crocodile found in Egypt resembles statue of the god Horus
Here is a story that will interest both reptile lovers and history fans. An international team of scientists has described a new extinct crocodile species from Egypt. The results were published in Royal Society Open Science, and the species was named Herugavialis cairensis.
It belonged to the gharials, crocodiles with long, narrow snouts. Today these animals live only in freshwater of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, but their ancestors once spread across the world. Remains were first found in the 1920s in 45-million-year-old rocks of the Mokattam Formation, including an almost complete skull. For a long time it was mistakenly assigned to the genus Tomistoma because it resembled the living false gharial.
A team from the UK, Sweden, Germany and Egypt, led by Paul Burke of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, re-examined the classification using computed tomography and found skull features that set it apart from known species. The funniest part is that the specimen has no tip of its snout, which reminded the researchers of the damaged nose of the Great Sphinx. The monument is built from the same rock formation where the fossil was found. That is why the animal was named after the god Horus, who may have inspired the builders of the Sphinx, as Professor Philip Mannion explained.
About 45 million years ago, the region was covered by shallow seas where at least three gharial species lived. The crocodiles finally disappeared from this area about six million years ago, when the Mediterranean began to dry up. I like how an old museum find is getting a new life thanks to modern methods.
Source: MK
It belonged to the gharials, crocodiles with long, narrow snouts. Today these animals live only in freshwater of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, but their ancestors once spread across the world. Remains were first found in the 1920s in 45-million-year-old rocks of the Mokattam Formation, including an almost complete skull. For a long time it was mistakenly assigned to the genus Tomistoma because it resembled the living false gharial.
A team from the UK, Sweden, Germany and Egypt, led by Paul Burke of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, re-examined the classification using computed tomography and found skull features that set it apart from known species. The funniest part is that the specimen has no tip of its snout, which reminded the researchers of the damaged nose of the Great Sphinx. The monument is built from the same rock formation where the fossil was found. That is why the animal was named after the god Horus, who may have inspired the builders of the Sphinx, as Professor Philip Mannion explained.
About 45 million years ago, the region was covered by shallow seas where at least three gharial species lived. The crocodiles finally disappeared from this area about six million years ago, when the Mediterranean began to dry up. I like how an old museum find is getting a new life thanks to modern methods.
Source: MK
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