328 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES!
distinctions between different species of Miocene horses, which form a nice series of species
transformations, yet Gish (1995) misquotes him to indicate that horses didn’t evolve at all!
Again and again, Gish falsely claims there are no transitional forms between the species, but
if he had bothered to read the original literature closely, or better yet, look at the real speci-
mens, he would have been overwhelmed by the continuous gradation in fossil species from
the Eocene to Equus. Finally, Gish falsely claims (based on out-of-context quotations from
outdated books written 50 years ago) that there are no transitional forms linking horses to
anything else. But those transitional forms have been known for a long time. They include
the archaic ungulates known as phenacodontids (documented by Radinsky 1966, 1969), and
the Paleocene Mongolian creature Radinskya (fig. 14.4), which is such a good link between
early perissodactyls and their relatives among arsinoitheres and elephants that McKenna et
al. (1989) had a hard time deciding what group to put it in.
Intelligent design creationist books also mention horse evolution but do not discuss it in
any detail. Davis and Kenyon (2004:96) deny the existence of the evolutionary sequence of
horses, yet make no further mention of it anywhere else in their book. Wells (2000:195–207)
discusses how the ideas of horse evolution have moved away from the old linear “straight-
line” notions to the modern complex phylogeny, but nowhere does he dispute the reality of
horse evolution. Instead, his convoluted argument seems to suggest that if we change our
notions from a simplistic linear model to a more complex bushy model, we are denying that
horse evolution occurred! Of course our notions have changed—we have more fossils and
more data. We would be bad scientists if our ideas didn’t change in the face of new data.
Sarfati (2002) makes the absurd claim that “the other animals in the sequence show hardly
any more variation between them than within horses today” (133). Clearly, he has never
looked at the actual specimens, because no one would mistake the tiny collie-sized Eocene
horses, nor Mesohippus, which was the size of a Great Dane, for any living horse (not even the
tiniest pony). Not only are they dramatically smaller than all living horses, but they have a
FIGURE 14.4. The Paleocene Chinese fossil Radinskya,
which is a primitive relative of the perissodactyls,
shows that they originated in Asia in the Paleocene.
The differences between this skull and the earliest
horses and rhinos are very subtle. (Photo courtesy
M. C. McKenna)
1 cm