Celebrate: National Day of the Horse

That's right - it's probably not on your calendar, but as of 2004, there is an official "National Day of the Horse", and that day is today, December 13th. Having grown up utterly horse-crazy (like 90% of adolescent girls) I find such a day of remembrance and appreciation very much well-deserved, and no doubt centuries overdue - human-kind simply wouldn't be where it is without the strength, speed, willingness, and impeccable grace of the horse.

The illustrations above I created in 2003 for a website devoted to the history of Frank T. Hopkins: fabled cowboy, endurance rider, and champion of the Spanish Mustang breed. While history rightly credits Spanish explorers with introducing the horse to the New World (and simultaneously forever changing Native American culture), a more accurate term for this action would be re-introduction. The evolution of the horse actually happened largely throughout the North American continent, just after the massive extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period (the one credited with wiping out our dear dinosaurian friends).

Roughly 54 million years ago, mere dog-sized Mesohippus slowly emerged from the forest and began sizing-up it's petit frame, lengthening it's limbs, eliminating most of it's toes (from 5 down to 1 per foot), and remodeling the structure of it's teeth, to handle the tough, fibrous new grasses of the expanding Great Plains. Eventually, the little woods-browser became what we know as Equus (a genus that would continue to evolve for many more millions of years) and the first horses made their way to Asia (along with various other American megafauna) via long-since-dissolved land bridges. Then, about 12,000 years ago (the end of the Pleistocene), for reasons still debated, Equus disappeared from North and South America, leaving it's Asian transplants to continue their development, and eventually intersect with the ancestors of modern humans. It would take those Spanish Conquistadores back in the late 1400s, crossing the oceans with domesticated animals in their ship's holds, to finally reintroduce the horse to it's indiginous continent of the New World.

The chart above is a visual comparison of today's Spanish Mustang next to two classic breed types: the Arabian Horse and the Quarter Horse. Compact, a touch coarse, and exhibiting a proportionately larger, more primitive head than his cousins, the Spanish Mustang reflects the same balanced but rugged anatomy that carried his ancestors through ice ages, extinctions, and much of human civilization - with strength, speed, and impeccable grace.

Here's to the one and only: the Horse.