Evolution Of Horses Essay

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The horse that we know today developed from a small creature about the size of a small-dog, the fossil record of horses extend back to 50 million years ago. During evolution, some horses had survive tough conditions to breed the next generation this process known as natural selection. The horse developed into completely different animal from Hyracotherium also known as “Eohippus” meaning the “Darwin horse” to Equus, today's horses. Throughout the millions of years many changes had occurred to the evo-lution of horse, this essay will discuss the evolution of horses with the use of tayony, natural selection and modern research.
When naming, describing, and classifying organisms including all animals, plants and microorganisms of the world, taxonomy is the right name used for this in science. The term taxonomy is used for the classifi-cation of living and once-living organisms. Taxonomy also refers to "scientific classification" or "biological …show more content…

The fossil record of horses extends back to an odd-toed ungulate mammal belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae, a dog-like ancestor 55 to 42 million years ago in the genus Hyracotherium in North America. Hyracotherium had a primitively little face , four-toed forefeet, three-toed hind feet, an arched back, small brain, and higher hindquarters than forehand. Later genus has increased in body size, brain complexity, the size of cheek teeth, lengthening of the face, and reduction of toe number. However, even though horses got larger over time but these trends are not seen in all of the horse lines. Genus such as Hipparion existed from 23 to 2 million years ago, showed gains in size, But some later genus such as Archeohippus, and Calippus got smaller again (Boundless, 2016),(Encyclopedia of Life,2015), (equineworld.co.uk, 2014), (Molen, M.

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