Pelecanus schreiberi
Pelecanus schreiberi is a fossil pelican described by Storrs Olson from Early Pliocene (5.3 to 3.6 million year old) deposits in the Yorktown Formation of North Carolina. It was a large species with distinctive features suggesting that it represents an extinct lineage with no living descendants. The specific epithet commemorates Ralph W. Schreiber (1942–1988), a former curator of birds at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and an authority on pelicans. Collected in 1972 by one Gerard R. Case from a mine on the southern side of the Pamlico River near Aurora, North Carolina, the holotype  is a right lower third of a femur of an egg-laying female. The denseness of the medullary bone 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 and axis vertebra without a spine from a mine of the same age in Polk County 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 pelicans ("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 ("P. conspicillatus") and a mysterious late Miocene species "Pelecanus odessanus" from the Ukraine.