Palaeontology

Darwin was baffled by prehistoric 'horse'

By T.K. Randall
March 19, 2015 ·  15 comments

The prehistoric beast was quite unlike anything Darwin had seen. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Olllga Well known for his work detailing the concepts of evolution and natural selection, Charles Darwin has also been credited with the discovery of several different animal species.

One of these, which he unearthed in Uruguay 180 years ago, was so utterly bewildering that he couldn't make any sense of it. With the body of a horse, the legs of a camel and the nose of an elephant, the peculiar species, which is thought to have roamed the Earth 10,000 years ago, was unlike anything he'd ever seen.Now however scientists including specialists from the University of York and the Natural History Museum in London have been able to use a technique called protein sequencing to determine that this bizarre species, Macrauchenia patachonica, was actually a close relative of today's horses.

"Fitting South American ungulates to the mammalian family tree has always been a major challenge for paleontologists, because anatomically they were these weird mosaics, exhibiting features found in a huge variety of quite unrelated species living all over the place," said co-author Ross MacPhee.

"This is what puzzled Darwin and his collaborator Richard Owen so much in the early 19th century."

Source: Telegraph | Comments (15)

Tags: Darwin, Horse