Until recently, schematic illustrations of the evolution of horses have been a prominent proof of the theory of evolution. Today, however, many evolutionists have openly refuted the validity of this scenario. In 1980, 150 evolutionists attended a four-day meeting at the Chicago Museum of Natural History in which the problems associated with stage-by-stage evolution were discussed. At that meeting, Boyce Rensberger stated that there was no support in the fossil record for the stage-by-stage evolution of horses:
The popularly told example of horse evolution, suggesting a gradual sequence of changes from four-toed fox-sized creatures living nearly 50 million years ago to today's much larger one-toed horse, has long been known to be wrong. Instead of gradual change, fossils of each intermediate species appear fully distinct, persist unchanged, and then become extinct. Transitional forms are unknown.101
About the "evolution of the horse" diagrams, the noted paleontologist Niles Eldredge said :
There have been an awful lot of stories, some more imaginative than others, about what the nature of that history [of life] really is. The most famous example, still on exhibit downstairs, is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps fifty years ago. That has been presented as the literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that that is lamentable, particularly when the people who propose those kinds of stories may themselves be aware of the speculative nature of some of that stuff. 102
In spite of the lack of any scientific support, to create this horse-evolution scenario, fossils from different species were arranged in a series from the smallest to the largest. Evolutionists claimed that this evolution occurred at different times in India, South America, North America and Europe. Various evolutionists proposed more than 20 different horse-evolution scenarios, but there is no agreement among them on the different proposed family trees. The only point they agreed on is that the 55-million-year-old dog-like creature called Eohippus (Hyracotherium) was the first so-called ancestor of horses. (See Eohippus.) However, this so-called ancestor of horses-supposed to have become extinct millions of years ago-is almost identical to a creature called the hyrax that still lives in Africa, but is no relation to a horse.103
Every day that passes, a new fossil is discovered that clearly demonstrates the discrepancy of these claims about the evolution of horses especially since Eohippus fossils have been found in the same stratum as two modern horse species, Equus nevadensis and E. occidentalis.104 This shows that horses living today lived at the same time as their supposed ancestors, proving that the so-called evolution of horses never occurred.
In his book The Great Evolution Mystery, the evolutionist writer Gordon R. Taylor examined topics that Darwinism could not explain. About the mythical horse series, he writes:
But perhaps the most serious weakness of Darwinism is the failure of paleontologists to find convincing phylogenies or sequences of organisms demonstrating major evolutionary change. . . The horse is often cited as the only fully worked-out example. But the fact is that the line from Eohippus to Equus is very erratic. It is alleged to show a continual increase in size, but the truth is that some variants were smaller than Eohippus [the first in the sequence], not larger. Specimens from different sources can be brought together in a convincing-looking sequence, but there is no evidence that they were actually ranged in this order in time. 105
All these facts show that one of the basic proofs for the series schema of horse evolution is totally imaginary. Like other species, horses also come into existence without leaving any evolutionary ancestor in the fossil record.
101. Boyce Rensberger, Houston Chronicle, 5 November 1980, Part 4, p. 15.
102. Niles Eldredge, quoted in Darwin's Enigma by Luther D. Sunderland, Santee, CA: Master Books, 1988, p. 78.
103. Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong, pp. 30-31.
104. Ibid.
105. Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery, London: Sphere Books, 1984, p. 230.
