Tomistoma

They usually live in freshwater environments, uh, in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia.

There are only two living species of gavian, or gavials today, the Gavialis gangeticus and, it sounds like a disease, right? And the Tomistoma schlegelii.

Those are the two that are alive today.

But now we know based on the fossil record that these gavials were once found all over the world.

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.