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Equidae (commonly known as the horse family) is the taxonomic family of horses and related animals, including the extant horses, asses, and zebras, and many other species known only from fossils. The family evolved more than 50 million years ago, in the Eocene epoch, from a small, multi-toed ungulate into larger, single-toed animals.
Equus (/ ˈ ɛ k w ə s, ˈ iː k w ə s /) [3] is a genus of mammals in the family Equidae, which includes horses, asses, and zebras.Within the Equidae, Equus is the only recognized extant genus, comprising seven living species.
The horse's evolutionary lineage became a common feature of biology textbooks, and the sequence of transitional fossils was assembled by the American Museum of Natural History into an exhibit that emphasized the gradual, "straight-line" evolution of the horse. Since then, as the number of equid fossils has increased, the actual evolutionary ...
Equid hybrids can be traced back to Africa where there are vast amount of equid species which resulted in natural crossing, creating hybrid species. These hybrids were found to be more efficient than the original species because they possess certain traits of both species, so scientists began to experiment by crossing other species of horse ...
Equinae is a subfamily of the family Equidae, known from the Hemingfordian stage of the Early Miocene (16 million years ago) onwards. [1] [2] They originated in North America, before dispersing to every continent except Australia and Antarctica.
Eohippus is an extinct genus of small equid ungulates. [1] The only species is E. angustidens, which was long considered a species of Hyracotherium (now strictly defined as a member of the Palaeotheriidae rather than the Equidae). Its remains have been identified in North America and date to the Early Eocene (Ypresian stage). [2]
The kunga was a hybrid equid that was used as a draft animal in ancient Syria and Mesopotamia, where it also served as an economic and political status symbol. Cuneiform writings from as early as the mid-third millennium BCE describe the animal as a hybrid but do not provide the precise taxonomical nature of the breeding that produced it.
The African wild ass (Equus africanus) or African wild donkey is a wild member of the horse family, Equidae. [3] This species is thought to be the ancestor of the domestic donkey (Equus asinus), which is sometimes placed within the same species. [4] They live in the deserts and other arid areas of the Horn of Africa, in Eritrea, Ethiopia and ...