Crocodylus checchiai

Crocodylus checchiai is an extinct species of crocodile from the Miocene to Pliocene of Libya and Kenya. C. checchiai was named in 1947 based on a skull from the Sahabi Formation. Remains from the lower Nawata Formation in the Turkana Basin of Kenya that were first attributed to the Nile crocodile have now been reassigned to C. checchiai, extending its geographic range. The morphology of the species, in particular the pronounced rostral boss, indicates that it may be the connecting link between African and American species of the genus Crocodylus. The remains of C checchiai were originally described by the Italian paleontologist Angiola Maria Maccagno in 1938. The holotype, an adult skull with an associated mandible, was discovered in the Sahabi Formation and later stored in the Istituto di Paleontologia dell’Università di Roma, where it was then thought to be lost. In the years following, four more skulls were excavated in Libya and stored in the Natural History Museum of Tripoli. While photographs of these specimens were published, most of the material was destroyed during WWII with only a single skull surviving, as it was kept in Rome for description at the time. This skull was determined to represent a different variation of C. checchiai by Maccagno, dubbed Crocodylus checchiai var. depressa in 1952. Over 50 years later scientist would eventually discover additional remains from Libya in the form of fragmentary cranial material described in 2008 and in 2012 two skulls from the Tanzanian Nawata Formation would be referred to the taxon by Christopher Brochu and Glen W. Storrs. The two Tanzanian skulls were both previously believed to represent the extant Nile Crocodile. In an attempt to shed light on the position of the species in Crocodylus, which had previously yielded only unclear phylogenetic results, Delfino and colleagues published a detailed redescription of the taxon in 2020. In the process they rediscovering sn813/lj, the skull used by Maccagno to describe Crocodylus checchiai var. depressa.