For thousands of years, the Nile River has been teeming with crocodiles, which were sanctified and revered by the Ancient Egyptians, who even mummified them, built incubators for them, offered them as sacrifices to the gods, and made them symbols of the deities.
An example of this is the god Sobek; a god represented as a crocodile-headed humanoid, known as the god of the Nile or the crocodile god. Sobek was associated with fertility and strength; he had major worship centers in Fayoum and Kom Ombo in Aswan. Hundreds of kilometers away from his ancient worship place, specifically in the Kharga Oasis, a new type of ancient crocodile appeared, proving that the origin of crocodile evolution is in Egypt and Africa.
The Valley Crocodile
A team of scientists from the Vertebrate Paleontology Center at Mansoura University discovered a new species of crocodile that lived nearly 80 million years ago. The team, led by Dr. Hisham Sallam, found fossils of two partial skulls and some frontal parts of three crocodiles at different stages of growth, which do not resemble our current conception of the family to which the ancestors of crocodiles belong, in the Western Desert.
The fossil belongs to the Deirosauridae family—a group of extinct reptiles that resemble modern crocodiles, which lived about 50 million years ago when the area known as the New Valley, where the fossils were discovered, was a sea and inhabited by these crocodiles. Unlike modern crocodiles that reside in freshwater sources such as the Nile, these predatory reptiles live in a coastal environment and have thrived due to their constitution and ability to hunt fish.
This fossil was named “Wadisox Kasabi” after the place where it was found, which is the New Valley Governorate; “Sox” refers to the god Sobek, while the second part of the name “Kassabi” is in gratitude to the late Dr. Ahmed Kassab, the geologist and paleontologist who inspired generations of geologists.
A picture of Sarah Saber, the lead author of the study, next to one of the "Wadisoxox Ksapi" samples.
"Wadisoxus" is the oldest species of crocodiles in the Deirosauridae family. Thanks to its ability to adapt, they survived the great extinction catastrophe that occurred about 66 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs at that time. Also, It is a new species in the family due to the difference in its physical characteristics from the rest of its family members, such as having four front teeth instead of five, and nostrils above the front of the head to help it breathe from the surface of the water. Its length ranged between 3.5 and 4 meters, and it specialized in preying on fish.
All these differences open a gateway for us to imagine the evolution of the Deirosauridae and their ability to adapt even after a natural disaster. They also put the continent of Africa, and Egypt in specific, on the map as the origin of modern marine crocodiles.
References
Academic.oup.com
JSTOR Daily
Phys.org