Fascinating facts about horses

In the beginning The horse belongs to the taxonomic family Equidae and is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus, or wild horse. The first horse, Hyracotherium (Eohippus), appeared in the Eocene. It is the earliest member of the family equidae, which includes all extinct horses and the modern genus Equus. The wild horse…

Ancient DNA bucks take on how the horse was tamed

DNA from 2,000-year-old stallions is helping rewrite the story of horse domestication. Ancient domesticated horses had much more genetic diversity than their present-day descendants do, researchers report in the April 28 Science. In particular, these ancient horses had many more varieties of Y chromosomes and fewer harmful mutations than horses do now. Previous studies based…