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Any member of the ungulate family Equidae, which includes the modern horses, zebras, and asses, all in the genus Equus, as well as more than 60 species known only from fossils. Equines descended from the dawn horse (see Eohippus). Wild horses, which once inhabited much of northern Eurasia, were smaller and had shorter legs than their domesticated descendants.

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Ungulate

Any hoofed, herbivorous, quadruped, placental mammal in three or four orders: Artiodactyla, the even-toed ungulates (including pigs, camels, deer, and bovines); Perissodactyla, the odd-toed ungulates (including horses, tapirs, and rhinoceroses); Proboscidea (elephants); and, by some authorities, Hyracoidea (see hyrax). There are ten orders of extinct ungulates. The hoof is dermal tissue, comparable to the human fingernail that extends over the end of a broadened terminal digit.

Mustangs

Many mustangs are descendants of sixteenth-century Spanish explorers' imported horses that had escaped and adapted to wilderness conditions. Modern feral horses represent hybrids of numerous breeds and primarily live in western states.

Books and movies usually depict mustangs sentimentally as symbols of freedom. In fact, mustangs often suffer starvation because fires, droughts, and urbanization destroy grazing sites. Pathogens spread fatal diseases in mustang herds. Mustangs occasionally die during natural disasters. Wild animals prey on mustangs. Humans sometimes poach mustangs to sell their carcasses.

The federal government approved extermination of the estimated 2 million mustangs living on public ranges in the 1930s. During the 1950s, Velma "Wild Horse Annie" Johnston (1912 - 1977) lobbied Congress to halt mustang slaughtering. Nevada legislation forbade contamination of water sources and use of aircraft to hunt mustangs. The federal government designated the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range in 1968. By 1971, Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act to protect mustangs in the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) jurisdiction. The BLM established Herd Management Areas (HMA). The Wild Horse and Burro Preservation and Management Act of 1999 assured additional federal protection. BLM personnel round up mustangs for public adoption. The Spanish Mustang Registry, Incorporated, and North American Mustang Association and Registry document mustangs. Sanctuaries protect some mustangs, including two HMAs that help Kiger Mustangs, which genetic tests indicate possess distinctive Spanish Barb traits.

Evolution

Mesohippus, an ancestor of the modern horse

The horse as it is known today adapted by evolution to survive in areas of wide-open terrain with sparse vegetation, surviving in an ecosystem where other large grazing animals, especially ruminants, could not.

Horses and other equids are odd-toed ungulates of the order Perissodactyla, a relatively ancient group of browsing and grazing animals that first arose less than 10 million years after the dinosaurs became extinct. In the past, this order contained twelve families, but only three families— Equidae (the horse and related species), the tapir and the rhinoceros—have survived to the present day. The earliest equids known as Hyracotherium developed approximately 54 million years ago, during the Eocene period. One of the first true horse species, it had 4 toes on each front foot, and 3 toes on each back foot. By the Pleistocene era, as the horse adapted to a drier, prairie environment, the 2nd and 4th toes disappeared on all feet, and horses became bigger. These side toes first shrunk in size until they have vanished in modern horses. All that remains are a set of small vestigial bones on either side of the cannon (metacarpal or metatarsal) bone, known informally as splint bones, which are a frequent source of splints, a common injury in the modern horse. Their legs also lengthened as their toes disappeared and until they were a hoofed animal capable of running at great speed.

Over millions of years, equid teeth also evolved from browsing on soft, tropical plants to adapt to browsing of drier plant material, and grazing of tougher plains grasses. Thus the proto-horses changed from leaf-eating forest-dwellers to grass-eating inhabitants of semi-arid regions worldwide, including the steppes of Eurasia and the Great Plains of North America. For reasons not fully understood, Equus caballus disappeared from North America around 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age.

Domestication and surviving wild species

Competing theories exist as to the time and place of initial domestication. The earliest evidence for the domestication of the horse comes from Central Asia and dates to approximately 4,500 BC. Archaeological finds such as the Sintashta chariot burials provided unequivocal evidence that the horse was definitely domesticated by 2000 BC.

Wild prototypes and modern species

Most "wild" horses today are actually feral horses, animals that had domesticated ancestors but were themselves born and live in the wild, often for generations. However, there are also some truly wild horses whose ancestors were never successfully domesticated.

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