fossil
A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...
Storrs Olson
Storrs Lovejoy Olson (April 3, 1944 – January 20, 2021) was an American biologist and ornithologist who spent his career at the Smithsonian Institution, retiring in 2008. One of the world's foremost avian paleontologists, he was best known ...
from
Early Pliocene
Early may refer to:
History
* The beginning or oldest part of a defined historical period, as opposed to middle or late periods, e.g.:
** Early Christianity
** Early modern Europe
Places in the United States
* Early, Iowa
* Early, Texas
* Early ...
(5.3 to 3.6 million year old) deposits in the
Yorktown Formation
The Yorktown Formation is a mapped bedrock unit in the Coastal Plain of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. It is overconsolidated and highly fossiliferous.
Description
The Yorktown is composed largely of overconsolidated san ...
of
North Carolina
North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and So ...
. It was a large species with distinctive features suggesting that it represents an extinct lineage with no living descendants. The specific
epithet
An epithet (, ), also byname, is a descriptive term (word or phrase) known for accompanying or occurring in place of a name and having entered common usage. It has various shades of meaning when applied to seemingly real or fictitious people, di ...
commemorates Ralph W. Schreiber (1942–1988), a former curator of birds at the
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is the largest natural and historical museum in the western United States. Its collections include nearly 35 million specimens and artifacts and cover 4.5 billion years of history. This large col ...
and an authority on pelicans.
Collected in 1972 by one Gerard R. Case from a mine on the southern side of the
Pamlico River
The Pamlico , from the North Carolina Collection's website at the
holotype
A holotype is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism, known to have been used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described. It is either the single such physical example (or illustration) or one of several ...
is a right lower third of a
femur
The femur (; ), or thigh bone, is the proximal bone of the hindlimb in tetrapod vertebrates. The head of the femur articulates with the acetabulum in the pelvic bone forming the hip joint, while the distal part of the femur articulates with ...
of an egg-laying female. The denseness of the
medullary bone
The medullary cavity (''medulla'', innermost part) is the central cavity of bone shafts where red bone marrow and/or yellow bone marrow (adipose tissue) is stored; hence, the medullary cavity is also known as the marrow cavity.
Located in the m ...
indicated this last fact as it is a feature of living egg-laying female pelicans. The features of the femur allowed it to be classified as a pelican, but quite different from living species. Some foot bones ( phalanges) have also been found. An incomplete
quadrate bone
The quadrate bone is a skull bone in most tetrapods, including amphibians, sauropsids (reptiles, birds), and early synapsids.
In most tetrapods, the quadrate bone connects to the quadratojugal and squamosal bones in the skull, and forms upper pa ...
and axis vertebra without a spine from a mine of the same age in
Polk County Polk County is the name of twelve counties in the United States, all except two named after president of the United States James Knox Polk:
* Polk County, Arkansas
* Polk County, Florida
* Polk County, Georgia
* Polk County, Iowa
* Polk Count ...
in central Florida are tentatively considered to be the same species. These remains are from the Bone Valley Formation, of nearly the same age as the Yorktown Formation.
The female is around the same size as the largest individual great white pelicans (''Pelecanus onocrotalus'') or
Dalmatian pelican
The Dalmatian pelican (''Pelecanus crispus'') is the largest member of the pelican family, and perhaps the world's largest freshwater bird, although rivaled in weight and length by the largest swans. They are elegant soaring birds, with wingspa ...
s (''P. crispus''), so a male could have been even larger – possibly the largest living or fossil pelican recorded, rivalled only by subfossil remains of a New Zealand pelican that has been described as a subspecies of the
Australian pelican
The Australian pelican (''Pelecanus conspicillatus'') is a large waterbird in the family Pelecanidae, widespread on the inland and coastal waters of Australia and New Guinea, also in Fiji, parts of Indonesia and as a vagrant in New Zealand ...
(''P. conspicillatus'') and a mysterious late
Miocene
The Miocene ( ) is the first geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about (Ma). The Miocene was named by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell; the name comes from the Greek words (', "less") and (', "new") and means "less recen ...
species ''
Pelecanus odessanus
''Pelecanus odessanus'' is a large species of fossil pelican, described in 1886 from Late Miocene fossil material since lost, from Novaja Slobodka, near Odesa in the Ukraine. With a tarsometatarsus length of , it was about the same size as ''Pele ...