Earle Harvey, age l2, of Portland, Maine, for his question:
Are zebras and horses related?
The members of an animal family have certain outstanding features in common. We can recognize the relationships among most of the sizable animals. Obviously the wild wolf is a cousin of the tame dog, and the boar is related to the pig. It also is safe to guess that a sprightly Zebra is related to a stately horse.
When zoologists classify an animal they do not take his size into consideration. The lofty camel is a cousin of the pony sized llama. A six foot porpoise and a l00 ..foot whale belong to the same family. A proud horse may stand 64 inches high at shoulder level, a wild ass only 40 inches, but both of them belong in the horse family, equidae.
Clothing material must be considered, however, but not its color. All the horse relatives are clothed in short, rather stiff hair and Wear hairy manes and long wavy tails. But the wild asses include milky whites, brown and donkey gray, and a horse may be almost any color or a mixture of colors ranging from white, through the browns to black. The gaudy dark and light stripes of the zebra do not disqualify him from the horse family.
Like all his kinfolk the zebra is a hoofed mammal. He is a vegetarian with horse type teeth for grazing and grass chewing. His eyes and nose, the bones of his skull and jaws resemble those of his kinfolk. He is bigger than many of his wild cousins and smaller than many domesticated horses and gaudier than any of his relatives. But the Zebra has all the basic features that qualify him as a Member of the horse family
Animals have been on earth for ages, and bit by bit they have changed through countless generations. In many cases an original family separated and its members adjusted to life in faraway places. The scattered groups often developed differently and handed on special features to their children. This happened to the horse family.
The original family began long ago in North America. Through the ages some members wandered to Asia, to europe and Africa and gradually adjusted to different surroundings. In Africa certain striped horses survived where the tall trees created a stripy background of dark shadows and vivid sunshine. Their descendants are the zebras who inherited the striped coats, plus all the basic horse features from the original equidae family.
The ancestors of the horse family roamed North America some 50 million years ago. They were small, dog sized animals that grazed together in timid herds, and they had not yet developed all the horse features. They galloped on little toes and hoofs that became stylish millions of years later. Tough, horse type teeth also came much later. But these and other basic features were shared and inherited by all the horses before the family separated to adjust to life in different parts of the world.