Showing posts with label horse evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label horse evolution. Show all posts

December 13, 2012 - Day of the Horse


If you are lucky enough to own a horse, today would be a great day to go on a nice long trail ride...OR to give your horse a day off and a special treat like peanut butter on toast, bananas, or grapes.


Most of us don't have horses, of course. But we can take a moment to think about the enormous contributions horses have made throughout history. Can you think of the Wild West or the plains Indians without horses? Medieval jousting tournaments and cavalries, rodeos and parades, wagon trains and stage coaches, farm horses and Clydesdales, circus horses and equestrian sports, Roman chariot races and the Pony Express—horses are a huge part of human history and an important part of modern life as well.

Horse evolution is often portrayed as a smooth line from Eocene (“dawn horse”) to modern day Equus, each stage larger and (I always think) more elegant than the one before. 













The Equine "Family Bush"
But horse evolution has really been non-smooth and bushy, with lots of creatures branching off—including all the equids that still live today, including zebras and donkeys and a variety of wild asses and onagers. As in most family trees, most of the equine species that have ever lived are now extinct.
All these ancestors of modern
horses are now extinct.










One of the things I've always found interesting about horse evolution is that equids first evolved in North America many millions of years ago. Some species crossed over the “land bridge” that used to connect Alaska and Siberia around 2.6 million years ago and migrated throughout Asia and even into Africa and Europe. These equids diversified into various species of zebras and quaggas, asses and donkeys and onagers, and of course into the modern species we call “horse.” While all these equids were flourishing in the “Old World,” the North American equids died out! (Scientists' most recent evidence suggests that this extinction may have occurred around 7,600 years ago.) It wasn't until the late 15th Century when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in America that horses were reintroduced to the North American continent.
Onager

Quagga









To learn more about the history of the horse, check out History for Kids or the much more detailed Sino-Platonic Papers.


Also on this date:









Anniversary of the startup of production of Susan B. Anthony dollars 




April 17, 2011


Horses Arrive in the New World


Back in the not-so-good old days, communication was slow and mostly local (NOT global), so people often didn't know what was happening elsewhere. British colonists recorded that, on this date in 1629, they first imported horses to North America—but I have to wonder if these Puritans knew that the Spaniards had been bringing horses to the continent for a century. Native Americans had acquired some of these horses through trades and raids, and by taming wild horses that were the descendants of horses that had escaped from captivity. As a matter of fact, when the Puritans were first shipping horses across the Atlantic, wanting farm animals to work the fields during the week, run in races on Saturdays, and pull their carriages to church on Sunday, the continent was already pounding with hooves, particularly across the mid-Western plains.

Interestingly, horses were in the New World from their very beginnings! Horses first evolved in North America over 55 million years ago. They wandered over to the Old World (Asia and eventually Europe and Northern Africa) over the Alaskan-Siberian land bridge, and there different forms such as asses and zebras evolved. From eight to ten thousand years ago, horses died out in North America. Scientists aren't sure why, although climate change and human hunters are likely causes for their continent-wide extinction. By the time Hernando Cortes arrived in Mexico in 1519, with 13 horses, horses were unknown to the Aztec and other groups of Indians.

Learn more horse history here. There is a great page on horses in pre-history—their evolution and the related species that evolved from ancient horse ancestors –and other pages on the domestication of the horse and the RE-introduction of the horse to the Americas. Don't miss the stuff on wild horses in the U.S. today!