Can someone please summarize the evolution of horses?

Question

Please, don't give me a link to a website or anything, I've gotten plenty of those. I just want a quick summary of the environmental changes over time and a quick summary of the changes in the horse ancestors.

And why do some people even bother saying "i don't know" or "nope" as one person just did?

Also, did the evolution of horses start when all the continents were still joined? Because it says on this one site that horses evolved in North America, but then they died out in North America, then they came from Europe with the Spaniards, but horses didn't evolve in Europe... it's confusing.

Answer 1

The horse as it is known today adapted by evolution to survive in areas of wide-open terrain with sparse vegetation, surviving in an ecosystem where other large grazing animals, especially ruminants, could not.

Horses and other equids are odd-toed ungulates of the order Perissodactyla, a relatively ancient group of browsing and grazing animals that first arose less than 10 million years after the dinosaurs became extinct. In the past, this order contained twelve families, but only three families— Equidae (the horse and related species), the tapir and the rhinoceros—have survived to the present day. The earliest equids known as Hyracotherium developed approximately 54 million years ago, during the Eocene period. One of the first true horse species, it had 4 toes on each front foot, and 3 toes on each back foot. the extra toe on the front feet soon disappeared, and by the Pleistocene era, as the horse adapted to a drier, prairie environment, the 2nd and 4th toes disappeared on all feet, and horses became bigger. These side toes first shrunk in size until they have vanished in modern horses. All that remains are a set of small vestigial bones on either side of the cannon (metacarpal or metatarsal) bone, known informally as splint bones, which are a frequent source of splints, a common injury in the modern horse. Their legs also lengthened as their toes disappeared and until they were a hoofed animal capable of running at great speed.

Over millions of years, equid teeth also evolved from browsing on soft, tropical plants to adapt to browsing of drier plant material, and grazing of tougher plains grasses. Thus the proto-horses changed from leaf-eating forest-dwellers to grass-eating inhabitants of semi-arid regions worldwide, including the steppes of Eurasia and the Great Plains of North America. For reasons not fully understood, Equus caballus disappeared from North America around 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age.

Answer 2

Recent 10,000 years ago to present
Pleistocene 2.5-0.01 My (million years ago)
Pliocene 5.3-2.5 My
Miocene 24-5.3 My
Oligocene 34-24 My
Eocene 54-34 My

Answer 3

tiny little dear-like almost tapir-like creatures that lived in the forest. then evolved to live in the grassy plains when the forests disappeared.

Answer 4

Eohippus was small and had 5 toes. Equus caballus is large and has hooves.

Answer 5

LOL,
can you be sure horses did evolve? What about peaches? Did they come from Peas and Ches? I don't eat the crap they serve in schools today. The horse has always been a horse, just like a monkey has always been a monkey, and a peach a peach.

Answer 6

If you aren't willing to follow the links with the answers how do you know what you turn in is correct. From the sounds of it you couldn't trace your grandparents.pp

Answer 7

God said "let there be horse" and there was horse and God said "the Horse is good", that was morning and evening of the Horse creation day.

Answer 8

horses evolved from mosquitoes.

Answer 9

nope

Answer 10

LOL YOU ARE FROZEN!