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A Brief History of Horses. By 55 million years ago, the first members of the horse family, the dog-sized Hyracotherium, were scampering through the forests that covered North America. For more than half their history, most horses remained small, forest browsers.
The Museum owns the largest collection of fossil horse skeletons in the world. Since the early 1900s, the exhibit has shown a classic, linear progression of evolution. Today, the display also offers a more current view of evolution with a complex, branching history.
3 kwi 2023 · The narrative about horses in North America told in several written histories is due for an update, according to a study published last week in the journal Science.
27 mar 2024 · The fossil record reveals horse origins here more than 50 million years ago, as well as their extinction throughout the Americas during the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago.
The horse's evolutionary lineage became a common feature of biology textbooks, and the sequence of transitional fossils was assembled by the American Museum of Natural History into an exhibit that emphasized the gradual, "straight-line" evolution of the horse.
In the 16th century, Spanish colonists brought horses from Europe, reintroducing them into the deserts and grasslands of western North America. Some Native peoples quickly became master horsemen, developing new ways of riding, controlling, and herding horses (along with donkeys and mules).
North America was dominated by horses in the Miocene. Just how abundant were horses during this time? One measure is that there is an entire floor of the Childs Frick Building at the American Museum of Natural History, over 5,000 square feet in area, that contains only horse fossils; the vast majority of these are from Miocene rocks.
