"Horses are among the best-documented examples of evolutionary development."—*World Book Encyclopedia (1982 ed.), p. 333.
"The development of the horse is allegedly one of the most concrete examples of evolution. The changes in size, type of teeth, shape of head, number of toes, etc., are frequently illustrated in books and museums as an undeniable evidence of the evolution of living things."—Harold G. Coffin, Creation: Accident or Design? (1969), p. 193.
"The first animal in the series, Hyracotherium (Eohippus), is so different from the modern horse and so different from the next one in the series that there is a big question concerning its right to a place in the series . . [It has] a slender face with the eyes midway along the side, the presence of canine teeth, and not much of a diastema (space between front teeth and back teeth), arched back and long tail."—H.G. Coffin, Creation: Accident or Design? (1969), pp. 194-195.
"The ancestral family tree of the horse is not what scientists have thought it to be. Prof. T.S. Westoll, Durham University geologist, told the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Edinburgh that the early classical evolutionary tree of the horse, beginning in the small dog-sized Eohippus and tracing directly to our present day Equinus, was all wrong."—*Science News Letter, August 25, 1951, p. 118.
"There was a time when the existing fossils of the horses seemed to indicate a straight-lined evolution from small to large, from dog-like to horse-like, from animals with simple grinding teeth to animals with complicated cusps of modern horses . . As more fossils were uncovered, the chain splayed out into the usual phylogenetic net, and it was all too apparent that evolution had not been in a straight line at all. Unfortunately, before the picture was completely clear, an exhibit of horses as an example . . had been set up at the American Museum of Natural History [in New York City], photographed, and much reproduced in elementary textbooks."—*Garrett Hardin, Nature and Man’s Fate (1960), pp. 225-226. (Those pictures are still being used in those textbooks.)
"Dr. Eldredge [curator of the Department of Invertebrates of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City] called the textbook characterization of the horse series ‘lamentable.’"When scientists speak in their offices or behind closed doors, they frequently make candid statements that sharply conflict with statements they make for public consumption before the media. For example, after Dr. Eldredge made the statement [in 1979] about the horse series being the best example of a lamentable imaginary story being presented as though it were literal truth, he then contradicted himself.
". . [On February 14, 1981] in California he was on a network television program. The host asked him to comment on the creationist claim that there were no examples of transitional forms to be found in the fossil record. Dr. Eldredge turned to the horse series display at the American Museum and stated that it was the best available example of a transitional sequence."—L.D. Sunderland, Darwin’s Enigma (1988), p. 82.
"Once portrayed as simple and direct, it is now so complicated that accepting one version rather than another is more a matter of faith than rational choice. Eohippus, supposedly the earliest horse, and said by experts to be long extinct and known to us only through fossils, may in fact be alive and well and not a horse at all—a shy, fox-sized animal called a daman that darts about in the African bush."—*Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe (1982), p. 31.
"In the first place, it is not clear that Hyracotherium was the ancestral horse."—*G.A. Kerkut, Implications of Evolution (1969), p. 149.
"The supposed pedigree of the horse is a deceitful delusion, which . . in no way enlightens us as to the paleontological origins of the horse."—*Charles Deperet, Transformations of the Animal World, p. 105 [French paleontologist].
"Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time."By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information. What appeared to be a nice, simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic. So Darwin’s problem [with the fossil record] has not been alleviated."—*David M. Raup, in Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin 50 (1979), p. 29.
"It was widely assumed that [Eohippus] had slowly but persistently turned into a more fully equine animal . . [but] the fossil species of Eohippus show little evidence of evolutionary modification . . [The fossil record] fails to document the full history of the horse family."—*The New Evolutionary Timetable, pp. 4, 96.
"The uniform continuous transformation of Hyracotherium into Equus, so dear to the hearts of generations of textbook writers, never happened in nature."—*G.G. Simpson, Life of the Past (1953), p. 119.
"Horse phylogeny is thus far from being the simple monophyletic, so-called orthogenetic, sequence that appears to be in most texts and popularizations."—*George G. Simpson, "The Principles of Classification and a Classification of Mammals" in Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 85:1-350.
"This is true of all the thirty-two orders of mammals . . The earliest and most primitive known members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous sequence from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed."—*G.G. Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944), p. 105.
"In some ways it looks as if the pattern of horse evolution might be even as chaotic as that proposed by Osborn for the evolution of the Proboscidea [the elephant], where ‘in almost no instance is any known form considered to be a descendant from any other known form; every subordinate grouping is assumed to have sprung, quite separately and usually without any known intermediate stage, from hypothetical common ancestors in the early Eocene or Late Cretaceous.’ "—*G.A. Kirkut, Implications of Evolution (1960), p. 149.