Earth and Sky Every Child Should Know / Easy studies of the earth and the stars for any time and place

by Julia Ellen Rogers

Just when and where and how our savage ancestors succeeded in taming the wild horse of the plains and the forests of Europe or Asia is unknown. Man first made friends with the wild sheep, which were probably more docile than wild oxen and horses. We can imagine cold and hungry men seeking shelter from storms in rocky hollows, where sheep were huddled. How warm the woolly coats of these animals felt to their human fellow-creatures crowded in with them in the dark!

It is believed that the primitive men who used stone axes as implements and weapons, learned to use horses to aid them in their hunting, and in their warfare with beasts and other men. Gradually these useful animals were adapted to different uses; and at length different breeds were evolved. Climate and food supply had much to do with the size and the character of the breeds. In the Shetland Islands the animals are naturally dwarfed by the cold, bleak winters, and the scant vegetation on which they subsist. In middle Europe, where the summers are long and the winters mild, vegetation is luxurious, and the early horses developed large frames and heavy muscles. The Shetland pony and the Percheron draught-horse are the two extremes of size.

What man has done in changing the types of horses is to emphasize natural differences. The offspring of the early heavy horses became heavier than their parents. The present draught-horse was produced, after many generations, all of which gradually approached the type desired. The slender racehorses, bred for speed and endurance rather than strength, are the offspring of generations of parents that had these qualities strongly marked. Hence came the English thoroughbred and the American trotter.

We can read in books the history of breeds of horses. Our knowledge of what horses were like in prehistoric times is scant. It is written in layers of rock that are not very deep, but are uncovered only here and there, and only now and then seen by eyes that can read the story told by fossil skeletons of horses of the ages long past.

Geologists have unearthed from time to time skeletons of horses. It was Professor Marsh who spent so much time in studying the wonderful beds of fossil mammals in the western part of this country, and found among them the skeletons of many species of horses that lived here with camels and elephants and rhinoceroses and tigers, long before the time of man's coming.

How can any one know that these bones belonged to a horse's skeleton? Because some of them are like the bones of a modern horse. It is an easy matter for a student of animal anatomy to distinguish a horse from a cow by its bones. The teeth and the foot are enough. These are important and distinguishing characters. It is by peculiarities in the formation of the bones of the foot that the different species of extinct horses are recognized by geologists.

Wild horses still exist in the wilds of Russia. Remains of the same species have been dug out of the soil and found in caves in rocky regions. Deeper in the earth are found the bones of horses differing from those now living. The bones of the foot indicate a different kind of horse—an unknown species. But in the main features, the skeleton is distinctly horse-like.

In rocks of deeper strata the fossil bones of other horses are found. They differ somewhat from those found in rocks nearer the surface of the earth, and still more from those of the modern horse. The older the rocks, the more the fossil horse differs from the modern. Could you think of a more interesting adventure than to find the oldest rocks that show the skeletons of horses?

The foot of a horse is a long one, though we think of it as merely the part he walks on. A horse walks on the end of his one toe. The nail of the toe we call the "hoof." The true heel is the hock, a sharp joint like an elbow nearly half way up the leg. Along each side of the cannon, the long bone of this foot, lies a splint of bone, which is the remnant of a toe, that is gradually being obliterated from the skeleton. These two splints in the modern horse's foot tell the last chapter of an interesting story. The earliest American horse, the existence of which is proved by fossil bones, tells the first chapter. The story has been read backward by geologists. It is told by a series of skeletons, found in successive strata of rock.

The "Bad Lands" of the arid Western States are rich in fossil remains of horses. Below the surface soil lie the rocks of the Quaternary Period, which included the drift laid down by the receding glaciers and the floods that followed the melting of the ice-sheet. Under the Quaternary lie the Tertiary rocks. These comprise three series, called the Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene, the Eocene being the oldest. In the middle region of North America, ponds and marshy tracts were filled in during the Tertiary Period, by sediment from rivers; and in these beds of clay and other rock débris the remains of fresh-water and land animals are preserved. Raised out of water, and exposed to erosive action of wind and water, these deposits are easily worn away, for they have not the solidity of older rocks. They are the crumbly Bad Lands of the West, cut through by rivers, and strangely sculptured by wind and rain. Here the fossil horses have been found.