The holotype skull (SMNS 10575) of H. cairensis n. gen. n. comb. (a) Photograph of SMNS 10575 in dorsal view, (b) interpretative drawing of SMNS 10575 in dorsal view, (c) photograph of SMNS 10575 in ventral view and (d) interpretative drawing of SMNS 10575 in ventral view. Abbreviations: f, frontal; ic, internal choana; j, jugal; m, maxilla; ma, maxillary alveoli; n, nasals; o, orbit; oc, occipital condyle; p, parietal; pa, palatines; pf, prefrontal; po, postorbital; pt, pterygoid; q, quadrate; sof, suborbital fenestra; sq, squamosal; sqp, squamosal prong; stf, supratemporal fenestra. Scale bar, 10 mm.
The Great Sphinx of Giza is an ancient monument carved into something vastly more ancient: rocks recording a world that existed long before humans, let alone Egyptian civilisation. A newly recognised crocodilian from the same geological formation lived about 45 million years ago. For anyone attempting to reconcile Earth's history with a literal reading of Genesis and its young-Earth chronology, the difficulty begins with the material from which the monument itself was carved.
As UCL News reports, researchers have identified Herugavialis cairensis, an extinct gavial, or long-snouted crocodilian, from Egypt's Mokattam Formation. Its nearly complete skull was discovered in the 1920s and had long been assigned to Tomistoma, the genus containing today's false gharial. CT scanning revealed distinguishing anatomical features, including a raised ridge around the eyes, supporting its recognition as a separate genus. The findings are published in Royal Society Open Science.
This is a useful example of how science corrects itself. A fossil does not cease to be informative because it has spent a century in a museum, and an identification does not become unchallengeable merely because generations of researchers have accepted it. Better tools and renewed scrutiny can expose distinctions that earlier investigators missed. Revising the classification strengthens our understanding of evolutionary history; it does not undermine the evidence that such a history occurred.
The animal also belonged to a very different Egypt. Shallow seas covered areas that are now land, and several gavial species inhabited its coastal waters. UCL describes a wider Mediterranean history in which crocodilian diversity fluctuated alongside changes in temperature and sea level, before the region lost its crocodilians around the Mediterranean drying crisis roughly six million years ago. Even that much later episode predates the conventional young-Earth creationist date for the entire Universe by orders of magnitude.
Marine fossils in Egyptian rocks are therefore not, by themselves, evidence of Noah's Flood. The relevant questions are when those rocks formed, what environments they represent, and how they fit into the sequence of geological and biological change. A single recent catastrophe cannot explain that history merely by putting everything underwater. Beneath the familiar monument lies evidence of an unfamiliar world — one whose immense antiquity cannot be accommodated within a literal young-Earth reading of Genesis.
The paper in Royal Society Open Science was accompanied by the UCL News report:
The Great Pyramid^ A Monument to the Problem with Flood Chronology. The Great Pyramid presents young-Earth creationists with an awkward chronological problem. Khufu's pyramid is conventionally dated to around 2560 BCE, whereas Answers in Genesis places Noah's Flood in 2348 BCE. On those dates, the pyramid had already been standing for approximately two centuries before the supposed worldwide catastrophe.
Precise estimates for Khufu's reign vary between scholarly chronologies, so 2560 BCE should not be treated as an exact construction date. Likewise, 2348 BCE is a calculation from a particular interpretation of biblical genealogies, not a date explicitly stated in Genesis. Nevertheless, the conventional archaeological dating places the Great Pyramid before the Flood date promoted by Answers in Genesis.
How Answers in Genesis handles the discrepancy
In its article Dating the Pyramids, Ken Ham's organisation, Answers in Genesis, makes its starting assumption explicit. Discussing dates that would place Egypt's earliest dynasties before the Flood, it declares:but we know that this cannot be true.
It suggests that Egyptian reigns may have been exaggerated or overlapped, permitting a shorter chronology. It also speculates, citing Josephus, that advances in pyramid building might reflect knowledge brought to Egypt by Abraham. Neither suggestion establishes a post-Flood construction date for Khufu's pyramid, and a much later literary claim about Abraham is not contemporary evidence of his involvement. Bear in mind when assessing the reliability of Josephus as a historical source, that he recorded popular beliefs as facts, and that he is the source of the belief that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible (The Pentateuch) which, if it were true would have Moses posthumously recording his own death and burial (by God) in a secret place when no-one else was present! (Deuteronomy 34: 1-6)
The article itself acknowledges that its proposed foundation date for Egypt, 2188 BCE, is unconfirmed. Its certainty therefore comes from its theological starting point, not from an independently demonstrated archaeological chronology.
What evidence do archaeologists actually use?
Dating Egypt's monuments involves more than accepting a single ancient author's list of kings:
The rocks create a second problem
- Historical and archaeological context. The pyramids belong within a sequence of royal monuments, settlements, burials and inscriptions. The University of Memphis Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology places Khufu's pyramid at approximately 2585–2560 BCE.
- Contemporary administrative documents. The logbook of Inspector Merer records the transport of limestone from Tura to Akhet-Khufu, the Great Pyramid complex, during Khufu's reign. This is direct evidence of the royal building operation. It does not, by itself, supply a BCE date, but it anchors the work to a named ruler.
- Radiocarbon measurements. Researchers have dated organic material associated with pyramid construction, including charcoal and plant remains. Ancient Egypt Research Associates explains that results broadly support the monuments' historical setting while also revealing complications: reused timber can make charcoal older than the construction in which it was incorporated. These limitations are investigated openly; they do not establish AiG's proposed replacement chronology.
The age of a monument and the age of its stone are separate questions. As the UCL report explains, the newly recognised crocodilian came from the approximately 45-million-year-old formation from which the Great Sphinx was carved. The sculptors shaped existing rock; they did not create it.
Any Flood-geology explanation attributing a monument's building stone or bedrock to Noah's Flood must therefore demonstrate that the monument was constructed afterwards. A structure cannot predate the formation of the rock from which it was built. Declaring the archaeological dates unacceptable because they conflict with Genesis does not resolve that contradiction and demands acceptance of the absurd claim that tradition and myth take precedence over testable and verifiable scientific evidence.
The contrast with the crocodilian study is revealing: researchers revised an inherited classification when better evidence became available. AiG's article instead makes conformity with its interpretation of scripture the condition that an acceptable history must satisfy. One approach allows evidence to change the conclusion; the other fixes the conclusion in advance.
New crocodile species discovered in rocks used to build the Great Sphinx
A team co-led by UCL researchers has identified a new species of extinct crocodile that lived in the Mediterranean Sea about 45 million years ago.
The species, described in a new paper in Royal Society Open Science, was discovered in Egypt in the same rock formation that the Great Sphinx of Giza was carved from more than 4,000 years ago. In addition, the skull is missing the tip of its snout, just as the Great Sphinx is missing the tip of its nose.
Given this coincidence, we decided to name the new crocodile after the Egyptian god Heru, who was possibly the inspiration for this monument.
Professor Philip Mannion, co-author.
Department of Earth Sciences
University College London
London, UK.
The name of the species is Herugavialis cairensis.
The new species is a gavial – one of a group of fish-eating crocodiles characterised by long, thin snouts. Only two gavial species are alive today, in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. Both are critically endangered.
However, the fossil record shows gavials once lived nearly all over the world, particularly across South America and the Caribbean, but also in Africa, Asia and Europe, including the Isle of Sheppey in the UK, in a period spanning more than 100 million years.
The research team, from the UK, Sweden, Germany and Egypt, analysed several fossils, including a nearly complete skull, that were discovered in the 1920s in the 45-million-year-old Mokattam Formation. At the time they were misidentified as belonging to the still alive species Tomistoma schlegelii (also known as the “false gharial”).
The researchers used CT (computed tomography) scanning to look inside the skull, identifying several features that distinguished it from Tomistoma, including a raised ridge around the eyes.
Herugavialis was not the only crocodile in prehistoric Egypt, whose coastal regions were submerged by the Mediterranean at the time. The shallow marine environments that covered these regions were also home to at least two other species of gavials.
Gavials are critically endangered today but they have so much history that few people know about. They lived all over the world, from Europe and the Americas to Asia. A number of gavials lived in the Mediterranean region. In fact, throughout much of the last 50 million years, this region hosted a high diversity of crocodiles, with a shallow sea covering much of what is now southern Europe and northern Africa. This crocodile diversity fluctuated over time, seemingly corresponding to changes in global temperature and sea level. Then, about six million years ago, the Mediterranean got cut off from the Atlantic Ocean and dried up, losing much of its water, resulting in the loss of all crocodiles in the region.
Dr Paul M. J. Burke, lead author.
Department of Earth Sciences
University College London
London, UK.
And now Department of Palaeobiology
Naturhistoriska riksmuseet
Stockholm, Sweden.
The research received funding from the Wallenberg Foundation, the German Research Foundation, the Royal Society and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
The skull of Herugavialis is kept at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart and was first described in a 1927 study by Lorenz Müller.Publication:
Artists impression of Herugavialis cairensis
A crocodilian skull collected a century ago has therefore yielded a clearer picture of life in Eocene Egypt, thanks to improved imaging and renewed analysis. Its reclassification illustrates science doing precisely what makes it reliable: treating inherited conclusions as open to revision when the evidence warrants it. The recognition of Herugavialis cairensis changes one branch of the evolutionary family tree; it does not call the existence of that tree into question.
For young-Earth creationism, the difficulties run considerably deeper than an inconvenient species name. Here is evidence of an ancient marine environment, an extinct crocodilian lineage and a regional history of environmental change extending over tens of millions of years. Compressing that history into a recent, year-long flood requires far more than pointing to marine fossils and declaring that water must once have covered the land. It requires an explanation of the ages, relationships and geological sequence that the evidence actually records.
The monuments at Giza add a particularly revealing irony. The Great Pyramid conventionally predates the Flood date promoted by Answers in Genesis, while the rocks from which the Sphinx was carved are vastly older than either monument. AiG's response is to make its interpretation of scripture the standard against which archaeological dates must be judged. That protects the belief from contradiction, but it supplies no independent evidence that the belief is correct.
The contrast could hardly be clearer. Scientists can acknowledge that a fossil was misclassified and improve their explanation without abandoning evolution or deep time. Biblical literalists must reject well-supported history to preserve a predetermined answer. Egypt's ancient crocodilians, and the rocks that preserved them, belong to the history revealed by evidence — whether or not that history fits Genesis.
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