A tiny champion-to-be? The earliest horses were a far cry from the long-legged animals in today's stables. Here is a short visual history of their humble evolutionary beginnings.
Image: Wikimedia Commons/Heinrich Harder
More In This Article
New research suggests that one of the earliest horses started out small—then got even smaller. As temperatures rose 55 million years ago during the ancient Eocene epoch, a North American horse species shrank from the size of a small dog to that of a house cat.
It would take millions of years and dozens of different genera until nature produced something approaching the modern horse (Equus ferus). The leggy show-jumper and powerful rodeo steed are of course products of modern breeding on top of eons of evolution. But the road to the arena and racetrack had humble beginnings.
View a slide show of eight ancient miniature horses.
Read more about the new findings on the smallest horse of them all.
See what we're tweeting about
2 Comments
Add CommentThe information you have regarding Richard Owen and Hyracotherium (apparently taken from Wikipedia) is incorrect. Owen absolutely did not identify Hyracotherium as a species of hyrax as a simple reading of his paper describing the first known skull will indicate. For more (including a quote from Owen) see: http://pigeonchess.com/2012/02/27/hyracotherium-misinformation-at-scientificamerican/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the excellent series of images above is intended to convey the alleged evolution of the horse, a pair of paleontologists would seem to have advised caution:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSimpson (1951) has shown that the phylogeny of horses is a luxuriant, branching bush, not the ladder to one toe and big teeth that earlier authors (Matthew and Chubb, 1921) envisioned.
Niles Eldredge, Ph.D. and Stephen Jay Gould, Ph.D. 1972. Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism. In: T. J. M. Schoph, Editor. Models in Paleobiology. San Francisco: Freeman Cooper & Company, p. 99.