A quartet of pelicans wings northward recently past a sailboat anchored in the Monterey Bay between West Cliff Drive and the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf. Long thought to be related to frigatebirds, cormorants, tropicbirds and gannets and boobies, pelicans instead are most closely related to the shoebill and hamerkop. According to an article in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, fossil evidence of pelicans dates back at least 36 million years to the remains of a tibiotarsus recovered from late Eocene strata of Egypt that bears striking similarity to modern species of pelican.
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