Horses: The Storkless Generation

Hyracotherium (more popularly known as eohippus) is not your garden-variety house-pest.

Alright, so I'm attempting to condense 50 million years of evolution into a blog. Absurd! Ridiculous! This weeks exploration began with the question "Where do horses come from?" Now, obviously they don't come from storks.  No, the storks have written the project off due to a failing distribution department and the complication of carrying a baby horse without unwarranted sags and dips mid-flight.


So, where do they come from?


See above. This strange horse/rabbit/moose-looking hybrid may look birthed from some bored geneticists beaker, but the Hyracotherium, also known as "Eohippus" or the "Dawn Horse," represents the ancestor of the modern-day horse. They sure have grown up, haven't they?


Anyway, check out the Horse Evolution Over 55 Million Years site for a quick overview of the creatures evolution. 


Some interesting facts:


The Hyracotherium's diet originally consisted of meat and vegetation. That's right, horses once ate meat, too. I suppose they enacted a strict raw foods diet. They even visited an orthodontist (and probably loved it as much as we do) to exchange those canines for flattened teeth suitable for chewing grasses.


They had toes rather than hooves. Look at the picture. Horses later developed hooves, but still retain the splint bones, remnants of these now half-removed toes.


These fox-sized creatures once roamed the hillsides of long-ago Paris, scavenging and devouring anything they could grasp with their little paws. Not exactly what I would call an adorable beginning, but one can't help ponder a different reality where people dressed these up in cashmere-knit sweaters, and called them...Moosy? Perhaps we would stroll up and down along the Paris marketplaces, this creature following in pursuit, still contemplating what animal to be.


For more info:


Evolution of the Horse - Basic Synopsis


Horse Evolution - Trends of Horse Evolution in Science

The Evolution of the Horse: A Record and Its Interpretation - I love reading old books as much as I do looking at them. This dates 1926 and is from The Quarterly Review on Biology.

Sharpening My Angle

So, I've been thinking how I "should" utilize this blog. The internet is the sharing of information, an interconnected network of many otherwise impossible connections, and, due to this I'm contemplating taking this idea of "obscurity" and refastening it; resetting its engine to boost its horsepower.

Here it is: The idea of "obscurity" as a subject is too abstract. The word floats amidst a sea of other words while the meaning flounders in this ocean vocabulary, drowning on its own premise. In other words the angle of which I've positioned myself is too broad, and to alter this I've decided to now restrict myself to questions.

Henceforth, this blog will answer direct, concrete questions relative to the world around us. They can (and will) consist of seemingly basic questions such as: Where do horses come from? (This one I'm using next week). What happened in the year xxxx in the region/country xxxx? You get the idea.

And, for this blog post, I decided to dissect the meaning of obscurity.

From Merriam-Webster's Dictionary:

¹ob·scure

 adj \äb-ˈskyu̇r, əb-\

Definition of OBSCURE

1

a : dark, dimb : shrouded in or hidden by darknessc : not clearly seen or easily distinguished : faint <obscuremarkings>

2

: not readily understood or clearly expressed; also :mysterious

3

: relatively unknown: asa : remote, secluded <an obscure village>b : not prominent or famous <an obscure poet>

4

: constituting the unstressed vowel \ə\ or having unstressed \ə\ as its value

— ob·scure·ly adverb

— ob·scure·ness noun

One could take a magnifying lens to each of the above definitions, ala Derrida-like, and burn away their significance in respect to this blog, but I, having a liking for "codes of honor," choose to adhere to a policy of doing something other than simply acknowledging something (and that something happens to be obscurity). It is one thing to acknowledge it, another to attempt to explain it. By attempting to explain the subject of obscurity, I feel I can share what I learn as opposed to establishing juvenile proclamations. (See post about the deep sea--missing details are we?)

I would also enjoy it if readers proposed questions (about anything) for me to investigate (something I enjoy doing). That way, the blog detaches from the egocentric orb that blogs often are (and why I loathe reading most of them) to become an interactive experience, like a chain where reader and writer learn through cooperation.

J.

Swimming the Deep Sea

I recently streamed a Netflix show "The Blue Planet: Deep." Wow. Simply wow. The deep ocean, though swarming with scientific absurdities and fascinating creatures, continues to puzzle oceanographers and chemists alike. For one, deep sea creatures use bioluminescence to communicate. This excites scientists due to the possibility of manufacturing energy through biological means.

I've oft thought about floating amid this unequivocal darkness, the ever-black tangle of jet streams and towering ocean floor juts that dwarf our land-based mountain ranges. Wandering through these thoughts, suddenly one realizes that anything is possible. Yes, light can be biologically generated. Yes, creatures can survive off toxic gasses and lava-high temperatures. These thoughts of the deep sea symbolize human impossibilities and how human beings are arrested by the limitations of their knowledge.

Praise obscurity, for it reminds us what little we know.