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Originally posted by evangel
What is most unconvincing to me is that the gaps are so huge despite \"billions\" of years. Billions seems like a whole lot of time (a humanly unfathomable amount in fact) to provide say an ancestor that is say something half-way between a worm and an elephant (rather than the examples you gave, Spoon which are actually much closer to the elephant's CURRENT form rather than the type of transitional form I'm interested in)
I honestly don't know what else I can give you. The section on elephants from the page I linked deals with thier evolution through stages like
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The first equid was Hyracotherium, a small forest animal of the early Eocene. This little animal (10-20\" at the shoulder) looked nothing at all like a horse. It had a \"doggish\" look with an arched back, short neck, short snout, short legs, and long tail. It browsed on fruit and fairly soft foliage, and probably scampered from thicket to thicket like a modern muntjac deer, only stupider, slower, and not as agile. This famous little equid was once known by the lovely name \"Eohippus\", meaning \"dawn horse\". Some Hyracotherium traits to notice:
* ** Legs were flexible and rotatable with all major bones present and unfused.
* ** 4 toes on each front foot, 3 on hind feet. Vestiges of 1st (& 2nd, behind) toes still present. Hyracotherium walked on pads; its feet were like a dog's padded feet, except with small \"hoofies\" on each toe instead of claws.
* ** Small brain with especially small frontal lobes.
* ** Low-crowned teeth with 3 incisors, 1 canine, 4 distinct premolars and 3 \"grinding\" molars in each side of each jaw (this is the \"primitive mammalian formula\" of teeth). The cusps of the molars were slightly connected in low crests. Typical teeth of an omnivorous browser.
At this point in the early Eocene, equids were not yet very different from the other perissodactyl groups; the Hyracotherium genus includes some species closely related to (or even ancestral to) rhinos and tapirs, as well as species that are distinctly equine. [Note: the particular species that probably gave rise to the rest of the equids, H. vassacciense, may be renamed, perhaps to \"Protorohippus\".][/b]
to modern day horses.