Miocene and early Oligocene (approximately 20-25 million years ago), grasslands became widespread in North America, where much of horse evolution occurred. As horses adapted to these habitats, long distance and high speed locomotion probably became more important to escape predators and travel great distances. By contrast, the greater flexibility provided by multiple toes and shorter limbs, which was advantageous for ducking through complex forest vegetation, was no longer beneficial. At the same time, horses were eating grasses and other vegetation that contained more grit and other hard substances, thus favoring teeth and skulls better suited for withstanding such materials.
Evolutionary Trends
For many years, horse evolution was held up as an example of constant evolutionary change through time. Some even saw in the record of horse evolution evidence for a progressive, guiding force, consistently pushing evolution to move in a single direction. We now know that such views are misguided; evolutionary change over millions of years is rarely so simple.
Rather, the fossils demonstrate that, although there have been overall trends evident in a variety of characteristics, evolutionary change has been far from constant and uniform through time. Instead, rates of evolution have varied widely, with long periods of little change and some periods of great change. Moreover, when changes happen, they often occur simultaneously in different lineages of the horse evolutionary tree. Finally, even when a trend exists, exceptions, such as the evolutionary decrease in body size exhibited by some lineages, are not uncommon. These patterns, evident in our knowledge of horse evolution, are usually discovered for any group of plants and animals for which we have an extensive fossil record, as we shall see when we discuss human evolution in chapter 24.
Horse Diversity
One reason that horse evolution was originally conceived of as linear through time may be that modern horse diversity is relatively limited. Thus, it is easy to mentally picture a straight line from Hyracotherium to modern-day Equus. However, today’s limited horse diversityonly one surviving genusis unusual. Indeed, at the peak of horse diversity in the Miocene, as many as 13 genera of horses could be found in North America alone. These species differed in body size and in a wide variety of other characteristics. Presumably, they lived in different habitats and exhibited different dietary preferences. Had this diversity existed to modern times, early workers presumably would have had a different outlook on horse evolution, a situation that is again paralleled by the evolution of humans.
FIGURE 7
Evolutionary changes in horses through time. The extensive fossil record for horses provides a detailed view of the evolutionary diversification of this group from small forest dwellers to the large and fast modern grassland species.
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