One of the famous examples to prove evolution is the horse series in which the first supposed horse ancestor, the five-toed, dog-sized, 10-12-inch-tall Hyracotherium, gradually evolved to the modern-looking one-toed horse.

The first scientist who came up with this horse evolution idea was the American paleontologists Dr. Othniel C. Marsh of Yale. According to his theory the evolutionary horse genealogy is as follows: Hyrocotherium > Orohippus > Epihippus > Mesohippus > Miohippus > Parahippus > Merychippus > Dinohippus > Equus (modern horses). ¹

Shortly after him, in 1951, the horse series hypothesis was thoroughly analyzed, and due to its many inconsistencies refuted by the well known paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson.

“…paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson reexamined horse evolution and concluded that generations of students had been misled [by Othniel Marsh’s 1874 horse evolution paper]. In his book Horses (1951), he showed that there was no simple, gradual unilateral development at all. … Marsh arranged his fossils to “lead up” to the one surviving species, blithely ignoring many inconsistencies and any contradictory evidence.

Ironically, his famous reconstruction of horse evolution was copied by anthropologists.” (Milner, The Encyclopedia of Evolution , 1990, Henry Holt and Company, Inc., page 222)

Although some paleontologists don’t believe anymore that any of these fossil horses are direct ancestors of any of the others, the horse series are still used in many text books as proof of evolution.

In 1944, in his book Tempo and Mode in Evolution, G. G. Simpson wrote: “Perhaps the best known demonstration of an evolutionary scenario is that of the horse series displayed in school and college textbooks and in museums. These charts and displays make the theory of horse evolution very neat, seemingly historical, all cut-and-dried. Actually, there are important problems with the theory and some serious disagreement, even among evolutionary scientists”.

Let see if his opinion is outdated by examining some of the problems of the horse evolution hypothesis.

The problem already starts with the first horse, the 10-12 inches tall Hyrocotherium. Not only is its origin unknown, i.e. no fossil record is connected to it, but according to evidences it also simultaneously coexisted with Orohippus, and Epihippus. Moreover, all these three supposedly different horse species are very similar to each other except their increasing sizes.

Here we can remark that simultaneously appearing and coexisting animals in history cannot be arranged into ancestral relationships. Thus they don’t prove gradual evolution.

Further, according to Francis Hitching[2] the already millions of years ago extinct Eohippus also called Hyracotherium, is almost identical to the mammal known as Hyrax that still lives in Africa, but has not the slightest connection with horses. Thus, the supposed evolutionary connection between Orohippus and Eohippus, a dog-sized, five-toed creature with a short neck, short snout, short legs, and a long tail, that lived about 75 million years ago, is also very questionable. Aditionally, some of the later horses in the evolutionary line after Eohippus – as Gordon R. Taylor the Chief Science Advisor of BBC observes – are smaller instead of bigger.

Actually the Hyracotherium can hardly be classified among the horse species, as Jonathan Sarfati wrote in the Scientific American: “Even informed evolutionists regard horse evolution as a bush rather than a sequence. But the so-called Eohippus is properly called Hyracotherium, and has little that could connect it with horses at all. The other animals in the “sequence” actually show hardly any more variation between them than that within horses today. One non-horse and many varieties of the true horse kind does not make a sequence”.[4]

The next huge problem is the morphological gap between the Epihippus and Mesohippus which is all of a sudden about two times bigger than its predecessor. The changes from one horse species to another, especially in this case, are left without any real explanation.

As in the case of Hyracotherium, Orohippus, and Epihippus, the similarites between Mesohippus, Miohippus, and Parahippus are also almost unnoticeable. Except for the size, there are no any major evolutionary changes. The sudden, great change between Meryhippus and Dinohippus is seen in their size and in decreasing the number of toes to only one.

There are different horse series that exemplify evolution and the Pliohippus is mentioned to be the first one-toed horse before the Equus (the modern horse). An article in National Geographic (January 1981, p.74) reported a result of archeological researches around the Nebraska volcano, also called a ‘prehistoric Pompeii’, where a fossilized one-toed horse and a three-toed horse hoof have been found, both a victim of the same eruption. The title of the article suggested a newly discovered proof of evolution saying: ‘An evolutionary moment is frozen in time. Complete skeletons of the horse Pliohippus verify the transition of the primitive three-toed variety to the one-toed type ten million years ago.’

Noticeably, the three-toed and one-toed horses both existed side by side, in the same locality. This hardly gives evidence of one being the ancestor of the other.  Furthermore, it is very unlikely that the Pliohippus could have been the predecessor of the Equus. The Pliohippus had deep facial fossae, whereas the Equus has none; the Pliohippus’s teeth are curved, but those of Equus are straight.

All in all, these fossils cannot demonstrate that the transitions were due to random variations and natural selection, so they fail to support Darwinian macroevolution.

“… while the overall picture of equid evolution is well known, the details are surprisingly poorly understood, especially for the later Pliocene and Pleistocene, ca. 3 million to 0.01 million years (Ma) ago, and nowhere more so than in the Americas.  There is no consensus on the number of equid species or even the number of lineages that existed in these continents”.[1]

More inconsistencies in the horse series

The number of rib bones does not agree with the sequence.

“There is an interesting discrepancy in the skeletal development of this [horse] series: the anatomy of the various models does not compare. For example, the rib court varies back and forth from 15 to 19: Eohippus and Hyracothedum had 18 pairs of ribs; Orohippus had only 15 pairs; then Pliohippus jumped to 19; and Equus scoff! is back to 18. Also, the lumbers of the backbone vary back and forth from 6 to 8. Therefore, many eminent scientists disagree on the theoretical chain of fossil horses.” —Howard Path, Blind Faith (1990), p. 119.

There are no transitional forms between each of these “horses.” As with all the other fossils, each horse suddenly appears in the fossil record.

“[The] fossils of these horses are widely scattered in Europe and North America. There is no place where they occur in rock layers, one above another. There is no sequence that would indicate that the largest developed from the smallest. Some of the difference in size may be accounted for by the difference in feed. In 1942, a herd of horses was found in a box canyon in Southern California. Three of them were caught and lifted out with ropes and pulleys. Due to poor feed, their backs were no higher than a table. Later a colt was born to these captives, and with good feed it grew much larger than its parents. Since a difference in size due to feed is an acquired characteristic, it is not inherited and does not account for permanent changes in a species.”

One of the problems is that because the horses existed on different continents, it becomes a stretch to assume they shared genetic information. Moreover, to use such and any mixture of horse series from different continents like India, America and Europe to prove gradual evolution is a logical fallacy called circumstantial evidence or an assumption that physical evidences are causally related.

Thus, many problems, like poorly understood details of horse evolution, co-existence of supposed evolutionary successive species, disagreements on how to classify fossils into species, etc – all these indicate that horse evolution is rather a wishful conjecture of scientists than a well established, verified scientific theory.

References

1. Weinstock et al., “Evolution, Systematics, and Phylogeography of Pleistocene Horses in the New World: A Molecular Perspective,” Public Library of Science: Biology, Volume 3 | Issue 8 | AUGUST 2005.

2. Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong, pp. 16-17, 19

3. A Search for Order in Complexity, Second Edition, By Leslie MacKenzie, David K. Arwine, Edward J. Shewan, Michael J. McHugh. Page 297

4. See J. Sarfati, The non-evolution of the horse, Creation 21(3):28–31, June–August 1999.

Related discoveries

“Horses and camels have muscles in their legs with tendons more than 600 millimeters long connected to muscle fibers less than 6 millimeters long. Such short muscles can change length only by a few millimeters as the animal moves, and seem unlikely to be of much use to large mammals. The tendons function as passive springs, and it has been assumed that the short muscle fibers are redundant, the remnants of longer fibers that have lost their function over the course of evolution. But Wilson and colleagues argue… that these fibers might protect bones and tendons from potentially damaging vibrations….

Their experiments show that short muscle fibers can damp the damaging vibrations following the impact of a foot on the ground. When the foot of a running animal hits the ground, the impact sets the leg vibrating; the frequency of the vibrations is relatively high – for example, 30-40 Hz in horses – so many cycles of vibration would occur while the foot was on the ground if there were no damping.

The vibrations might cause damage, because bone and tendon are susceptible to fatigue failure. Fatigue in bones and tendons is the accumulation of damage resulting from repeated application of stresses. Bone fatigue is responsible for the stress fractures suffered by both human athletes and racehorses, and tendon fatigue may explain at least some cases of tendonitis. Wilson et al. suggest that the very short muscle fibers protect both bones and tendons from fatigue damage by damping out vibrations…”[a]

This wonderful discovery of the function of muscle fibers certainly adds to the argument of design. Design is discovered only by understanding the biochemical and physiological structures in the minutest details without any prejudice.

Reference:

a. R. Mcneill Alexander, “Biomechanics: Damper For Bad Vibrations”, Nature, 20-27 December 2001

`