Yunnan horse

Not to be confused with the Yannon domestic horse breed.

Yunnan horse
Temporal range: Pleistocene
Holotype skull (IVPP V4250.1), Paleozoological Museum of China
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Perissodactyla
Family: Equidae
Genus: Equus
Subgenus: incertae sedis
Species:
†E. yunnanensis
Binomial name
†Equus yunnanensis
Colbert (1940)

The Yunnan horse (Equus yunnanensis) is an extinct species of equine that was present in East Asia during the Pleistocene[1][2][3] very likely as a grazer on open tracts of grassland.[1] It was a small equine comparable in size to the modern Przewalski's horse.

It was first described by Edwin H. Colbert from dental fossils collected by Walter W. Granger in the Ma Kai Valley in northern Yunnan ten miles south of the town of Ma kai in Guangnan County as part of the program of the Central Asiatic Expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History in the winter of 1926–1927.[2] They were the most numerous fossils of a single type of animal in the Ma Kai Valley deposits.

Edwin H. Colbert thought it almost identical with an Equus collected by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in the Upper Irrawaddy sediments of Myanmar: "Indeed, judging by the evidence at hand, these two representations of the genus, one in Burma and one in Yunnan appear to be cospecific".[2]

Authors have considered it a "stenonine horse", probably only distantly related to true horses.[4]

References

  1. ^ a b Elewa, Ashraf M. T. (2008). Mass Extinction. Springer ISBN 978-3-540-75915-7 p. 172
  2. ^ a b c Colbert, EH. (1940). Pleistocene mammals from the Ma Kai valley of northern Yunnan, China. American Museum Novitates, 1099
  3. ^ Liu H, Yu Y, (1974), New materials of E. yunnanensis in Yanmou, Yunnan. On diagnosis of E. yunnanensis and phylogeny of Equus in Asia. Vertebrata PalAsiatica, 12 (2), 126–134.
  4. ^ Sun, Boyang; Deng, Tao (2019-11-13). "The Equus Datum and the Early Radiation of Equus in China". Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. 7. doi:10.3389/fevo.2019.00429. ISSN 2296-701X.