A new species of horse fossil dated 4.4 million years ago was discovered in Ethiopia.
The ancient horse was named Eurygnathohippus woldegabrieli, after a renowned Los Alamos National Laboratory geologist Giday WoldeGabriel, who has significant and on-going contributions to the Ethiopian archaeological site. Found in the Afar Region, it has the size of a small zebra, hooves with three toes and a diet of grass and shrubs.
Raymond L. Bernor, a horse expert at the Howard University College of Medicine’s Laboratory of Evolutionary Biology, carefully analyzed the horse fossil.
They found that the ancient horse is totally different from the species which were over 5 million years old and from those 3.5 million years and younger. Those from the younger species have longer noses and remarkable height compared to their ancestors. According to the scientists, these attributes were developed in order to adapt to its environment which is mostly grasslands.
The first fossil found from the E. woldegabrieli composed of teeth and bones back in 2001 at the Afar Region’s Gona area. This ancient horse lived in the times where various types of animals thrived in the same region as well as the early human species Ardi or Ardipithecus ramidus.
According to Gona project project paleontologist and co-athor of the study Dr Scott Simpson, "The fossil search team spreads out to survey for fossils in the now arid badlands of the Ethiopian desert. Among the many fossils we found are the two ends of the foreleg bone—the canon—brilliant white and well preserved in the red-tinted earth."
In 2002, the research team found the connecting bones of the ancient horse. Although it was already vertically cut, it proved to be the same length of the leg bone, which was lean. This is another indication of the adaptive development of the ancient horses to become faster runners in order to avoid predators such as lions, hyenas and wild cats.
Further examination of the teeth provides evidence that they subsisted on grass in the grassy and shrubby woodlands where they roamed. The teeth fossils were longer than its ancestors’ and the tooth enamel analysis verified that the E. woldegabrieli maintained its diet on grass.
"Grasses are like sandpaper. They wear the teeth down and leave a characteristic signature of pits and scratches on the teeth so we can reliably reconstruct their ancient diets," explained Simpson.
The study was published in the November issue of Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
