Mesohippus - Middle Eocene-Early Oligocene (37-32 Ma)Horses, the vigilant eyes of an angry God. I th

Mesohippus - Middle Eocene-Early Oligocene (37-32 Ma)Horses, the vigilant eyes of an angry God. I think most people are familiar with horses and their journey to becoming our third best friend, and Mesohippus is plucked right from the earlier acts of that transformation.Mesohippus lived, along with many horse ancestors, in North America. It was about two feet tall. It was still far from becoming a grassland animal. Its teeth were still designed for eating twigs and fruit. But, it shows a few important steps towards modern horse anatomy. Firstly, its snout was becoming more narrow. Its brain was larger than its forebears too, and was probably very similar to a modern horse’s. It was leaner, starting to develop that aerodynamic horse skeleton.Its legs are longer than those of of its ancestors, and it now has three toes instead of four, with only the middle toe bearing the weight of its body. Eventually, that middle toe would go on to be its only toe, the ‘fingernail’ of which becoming the hoof. The genes for extra toes still exist in horses, and sometimes they’re born with an extra toe that looks pretty similar to Mesohippus’. This was probably around the point when horses started running as a survival tactic. Eocene North America was also home to Hyaenodonts and Nimravids, which probably ate Mesohippus if they could catch it. Not to mention various species of flightless bird (Gastornis was a herbivore, as we talked about before, but there were other flightless birds in the early Cenozoic that absolutely ate horses). Obviously, this pressure from fast predators was helpful when humans needed to go places faster.I wasn’t sure which horse I wanted to talk about today (because for some reason, I said I’d do a horse). I went through a few. I didn’t want to do Eohippus or Propalaeotherium, because I don’t think there’s anything new I could say about them. So I went forward in time a little bit and got to know Mesohippus. It’s a neat little animal, and an interesting transition between the short, chubby horses of the early Eocene and the towering, omnipotent grass annihilators we know and righteously fear today. -- source link
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