The modern horse appears
Equus evolves in North America with a single toe on each foot and spreads across the world.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.4 million years
- Known to
- ± 300 thousand years
- Era
- Pliocene, Cenozoic
Equus, the genus containing all living horses, asses and zebras, appears in North America around 4 million years ago: large, long-legged, with a single weight-bearing toe on each foot and teeth built for a lifetime of grass. It crosses the Bering land bridge and reaches Eurasia and Africa within a million years. Horses then go extinct in the Americas at the end of the Pleistocene and are absent for ten thousand years until the Spanish bring them back — to the continent where they evolved.