The first of the horses has been called Eohippus (dawn horse), but experts frequently prefer to call it Hyracotherium, since it is like our modern hyrax, or rock badger. Some museums exclude Eohippus entirely because it is identical to the rabbit-like hyrax (daman) now living in Africa. Those experts who cling to their Eohippus theory have to admit that it climbed trees. The four-toed hyracotherium does not look the least bit like a horse. The hyrax foot looks like a hoof, because it is a suction cup so the little animal can walk right up vertical trees! Horses do not have suction cups on their feet.
Fossils of Eohippus have been found in the top-most strata, alongside of fossils of two modern horses : Equus nevadensis and Equus accidentalis.
Here is what some scientists say about Eohippus:
"The ancestral family tree of the horse is not what scientists have thought it to be. Professor T.S. Westoll, Durham University geologist, told the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Edinburgh that the early classical evolutionary tree of the horse, beginning in the small dog-sized Eohippus and tracing directly to our present day Equinus, was all wrong." (Science News Letter, August 25, 1951, p. 118)
"Once portrayed as simple and direct, it is now so complicated that accepting one version rather than another is more a matter of faith than rational choice. Eohippus, supposedly the earliest horse, and said by experts to be long extinct and known to us only through fossils, may in fact be alive and well and not a horse at all. It is a shy, fox-sized animal called a daman that darts about in the African bush.'' (Francis Hitching, The neck of the Giraffe, 1982, p.31 )
" The uniform continuous transformation of Hyracotherium into Equus, so dear to the hearts of generation of textbook writers, never happened in nature." (George G. Simpson, Life of the Past, 1953, p. 119)
For more information on Eohippus go tohttp://www.wikipedia.com .
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