Thoroughbred horses are increasingly inbred

By ELIENE AUGENBRAN Inbreeding in Thoroughbreds has increased significantly in the last 45 years, with the greatest rise in the last 15 or so years. Every Thoroughbred horse alive today is descended from three stallions and a larger selection of mares in 17th and 18th century England. Since then, no horses outside this lineage have…

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…