Timothy George, age 12 of Tonopah, Arizona, for his question.:
What relatives has the horse?
His family name is Equidae, from the Latin ward for horse. Considering what an important animal he is, the horse has very few cousins indeed. All of them look enough like him to be recognized and most varieties can intermarry and ha=re horsy children. The family includes horses the asses, the donkeys and the zebras. A mule is the offspring of an ass and a horse and as a rule it cannot have children of its own.
To be a member of the Equidao family, an animal must have four single hoofs, a mane and a tail of long, coarse hair. He must also have strong grinding teeth with high crowns which wear down as he grows older. He is a sizeable animal and one of the swiftest on four feet. Add this all up and you have one of the most handsome animals in the world.
The horse family, we believe, got its start in the New World some 60 million years ago. The horsy ancestor was a little fellow, only 11 inches tall at shoulder level. Instead of hoofs he had toes, four toes on each front foot and three on each hind foot. Even then the little fellow could travel, for we find his bones in Europe. Scientists think he trotted over a land bridge which the n existed between the Old World and the New.
Through countless generations he grew bigger and developed a hoof from a single toe on e;,.ch foot. He also grew stronger teeth and trotted forth to settle down in Asia and Africa. For some unknown reason, the horse either left the New World altogether or failed to survive here.
Wherever he settled, he adapted to his surroundings. In so me areas he developed into a big powerful hors.:, in others he became a wild pony or an ass, more like his remote ancestors.
As a rule, these horsy colors were brown or dun colored animals. But certain horses in Africa had to cope: with a background of vivid light and shade. They had to blend into this brilliant scenery or fall prey to the hungry lions. These horses became: the.stripped zebras.
Donkeys descended from wild asses and nave been tamed for 6,000 years or more. They helped to build the pyramids some 5,000 years ago. The horse may have been first tamed by the Babylonians some 2,500 years ago and all our modern breeds are developed from various horses tamed before the dawn of modern times.
We hear of wild horses living in canyons and other remote places, but these animals are not truly wild. They or their ancestors are escapees from captivity. When captured, they can be retrained. Only one truly wild horse exists today. He is named the przewalski after the explorer who discovered him, but we can call him by his more pronounceable name, the tarpan. This fellow runs wild, very wild in Mongolia and the Alti mountains of Asia. He is a short, stocky, big headed animal, very like his distant ancestors.