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.