Mokattam Formation

A new species and genus of crocodile.

Researchers reexamined fossils from Egypt's Mokattam Formation, the same limestone formation connected to the Great Sphinx and the pyramids at Giza.

They determined this skull, originally unearthed in the 1920s, is not what they initially thought.

And there's a wild coincidence.

For more than a hundred million years, they likely lived in shallow marine environments.

They found several of these crocodile fossils from Egypt's 45-million-year-old Mokattam Formation during the '20s and recovered them from there.

And for a time, scientists believed these fossils, including a nearly complete croc skull, belonged to the Tomistoma because they resembled the gavial that's alive today.

But now we've have scientific advances, and paleontologists have been able to look inside skull fossils like the one from the 1920s, and this one is pretty well preserved despite the missing snout tip.