Pelicans are large aquatic Birds found on fresh, brackish and marine
waters on every continent except Antarctica. They have fully webbed feet, and
distinctive pouches beneath their bills, which help them to capture and swallow
quite large prey. They have a fossil record dating back to the Oligocene, with
representatives known from every continent they now inhabit. In the nineteenth
century Sir Proby Thomas Cautley amassed a large collection of Pelican fossils
from the Siwalik Hills in what was then British India. However the
stratigraphic and geographic origins of the specimens are not well recorded
(Cautly did not actually collect them himself) so it is unclear if the
specimens date from the Miocene, Pliocene or even Pleistocene and whether they
were excavated in modern India or Pakistan.
In a paper published in the journal PLoS One on 3 November 2014,
Thomas Stidham of the Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Systematics at
the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academyof Sciences, Kewal Krishan, Bahadur Singh and Abhik Ghosh of the Department of Anthropology at Panjab University and Rajeev Patnaik of the Department of Geology at Panjab University describe the discovery of a new Pelican fossil from
Khetpurali in Haryana State in India.
The specimen comprises a single tarsometatarsus (lower leg bone –
Bird fossils often consist only of leg or foot bones, as these are denser than
other Bird bones), from the Tatrot Formation, dated to about 2.8 million years
ago (i.e. the end of the Pliocene). The same section has previously produced
Crocodile, Fish and Crab fossils, and has been interpreted as a floodplain pond
environment.
Tarsometatarsus tentatively referred to Pelecanus sivalensis. (A) dorsal; (B)
medial; (C) plantar; (D) lateral; (E) distal; and (F) proximal views. The arrow
in (E) indicates the concave notch in the medial side of trochlea II that is a
Steganopodes synapomorphy. The scale bar is 1 cm, with one scale bar for parts (A–D)
and one for (E–F). Abbreviations: df—distal foramen; f—small pneumaticforamen;
ie—intercondylar eminence; mc—medial crest of the hypotarsus; mf—fossa for
metatarsal I; mr—ridge medial to the dorsal pneumaticforamen that is part of
the extensor retinaculum attachment; pf—dorsal pneumatic foramen where the
proximal foramina would be in other taxa;pl—lateral plantar opening of the
proximal foramen; pm—medial plantar opening of the proximal foramen; r—ridge on
the medial hypotarsal crestthat bounds a concave area to its medial side; tc—tendinal
canal opening; tg—tendinal groove.Stidhamet
al. (2014).
Two fossil Pelican species have previously been described from the
Siwalik Hills, Pelecanus sivalensis
and Pelecanus cautleyi. Unfortunately
neither of these species are described from specimens that include the tarsometatarsus,
making it impossible to assign the new specimen to species level, although it
is thought likely to belong to the smaller species, Pelecanus sivalensis.
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