Horses have one toe on each foot. Horses are odd-toed animals and have only one toe. The rest of the toes have degenerated. The horse's ancestor, the Patriarch, had three toes, and over time the rest of the toes degenerated, leaving only the middle toe, which evolved into the hoof.

Horses are so rich in fossils that their evolution has been studied in great detail. The evolution of the horse is often used as an example of evolution.

The earliest horse, called the Patriarchal Horse, appeared in North America 57 million years ago, during the Eocene Epoch. They were the size of a dog, had arched backs, and multiple toes on their limbs (four toes on their front feet and three on their hind feet).

There were many different clades of the Archaeopteryx. Some clades grew larger and larger and became better at running, while others grew smaller and smaller. By the time of the Miocene, the three-toed horse, represented by the horse-like animals, had become a very prosperous group of animals, and was a common fossil animal in the stratigraphic paleontology, which was often used as an important basis for determining the geological age.

Expanded Information

The most direct ancestor of the modern horse was the dingo, which appeared in the Late Miocene, 12 million years ago, and the modern horse appeared in the Pliocene, 4 million years ago. North America has always been the center of origin and evolution of horses and equids. Horses originated here and radiated in all directions. Horses spread to Eurasia through the Bering Land Bridge, formed during the Ice Age, and entered Africa in the Pliocene, becoming an important member of the continent's fauna. Horses also spread through the Central American Isthmus to South America.

By about 20,000 years ago at the latest, the horse was completely extinct in North America, and even earlier in South America. The cause remains a mystery. Some think it had something to do with overhunting by Amerindians. Since then, in nearly 19,500 years as the birthplace of the horse in North America for the first time there is no horse, until the sixteenth century A.D. Spaniards once again brought the horse back to the Americas. Discovery produced a program about the horse, said "when the Indians first saw the Spanish brought the horse, it felt as if they were seeing an old friend after a long time". When the Indians first saw the horses brought by the Spaniards, it was like meeting an old friend they hadn't seen in a long time.

Modern horses were domesticated from European wild horses. Horses in the wild are extinct. The surviving Przewalski's wild horse is not an ancestor of the domestic horse. The evolutionary journey of the horse has been fraught with hardships and dangers. The equine family was once so prosperous that dozens of genera evolved before and after, but in the end only one genus and six or seven species remain today. The rise and fall of the horse is actually the rise and fall of the odd-toed animals, which are generally in decline in modern times.

Horses can also be used for milk and meat, and Islamic law prohibits the consumption of horsemeat (Muslims, Arabs and Persians, but not Turks), and Pope Gregory III banned Christians from consuming horsemeat in 732 A.D., but then it didn't work very well, and now the French and Italians consume horsemeat, and the Japanese consider horsemeat to be nutritious meat. During World War II, the United States allowed butchers to serve horsemeat to make up for the lack of beef supply, but after World War II, under pressure from ranchers in the western U.S., it was banned again. Horse's milk has long been a food for nomads, and is especially good for making "horse milk wine".

As the use of the horse faded, a variety of ponies were bred in many countries in the latter half of the 20th century for use as pets or guides. Now, after thousands of years of human breeding, there are many different kinds of horses, ranging from as tall as 2 meters to as little as 0.56 meters, with varying body shapes.

Baidu Encyclopedia - Horse