Eohippus

Eohippus Temporal range: Ypresian PreЄ Є O S D C P T J K Pg N
National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Order:	Perissodactyla
Family:	Equidae
Genus:	†Eohippus (Marsh, 1876)
Binomial name
†E. angustidens (Cope, 1875)
Synonyms
Eohippus validus Hyracotherium angustidens H. a. angustidens H. a. etsagicum H. vasacciensis H. v. vasacciensis H. cusptidatum H. seekinsi H. loevii Orohippus angustidens Orohippus cuspidatus Orohippus vasacciensis Lophiotherium vasacciense

Eohippus is an extinct genus of small equid ungulates. The only species is E. angustidens, which was long considered a species of Hyracotherium. Its remains have been identified in North America and date to the Early Eocene (Ypresian) stage.

Discovery

Restoration by Heinrich Harder

File:Eohippus.jpg

Restoration by Charles Knight

In 1876, Othniel C. Marsh described a skeleton as Eohippus validus, from the Greek ηώς (eōs, "dawn") and ιππος (hippos, "horse"), meaning "dawn horse". Its similarities with fossils described by Richard Owen were formally pointed out in a 1932 paper by Sir Clive Forster Cooper. E. validus was moved to the genus Hyracotherium, which had priority as the name for the genus, with Eohippus becoming a junior synonym of that genus. Hyracotherium was recently found to be a [paraphyletic] group of species, and the genus now includes only H. leporinum. E. validus was found to be identical to an earlier-named species, Hyracotherium angustidens (Cope, 1875), and the resulting binomial is thus Eohippus angustidens.

Common misconception on size

In elementary-level textbooks, Eohippus is only described as being "the size of a small Fox Terrier", despite the Fox Terrier being about half the size of Eohippus. This arcane analogy was so curious that Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay about it ("The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone", essay #10 in his book, Bully for Brontosaurus), in which he concluded that Henry Fairfield Osborn had so described it in a widely distributed pamphlet. The reasons for this comparison are unclear, but Gould posits that Osborn, a keen fox hunter, could have made a natural association between horses and the dogs that accompany them.

In popular culture

An Eohippus, along with numerous dinosaurs, was portrayed using stop-motion animation in the 1969 Ray Harryhausen movie The Valley of Gwangi.