You are what you eat...

Climate and dietary changes shaped the evolution of the horse.

New research shows that the evolutionary path of the modern horse was affected by the food available to its prehistoric ancestors, and that that evolutionary changes in tooth anatomy lag behind the dietary changes by a million years or more.

The new findings are of great value to biologists and zoologists to understand more about the natural selection and adaptation processes in animal species, although it will take more data and research to get a clearer picture of this very slow adaptation process. Even then, we know that the history of life is not simple and never be fully determined.

The study does emphasise that diet change will influence horse evolution and so the way we feed our horse nowadays will also affect this adaptation process.
We must be aware that we, humans, change diets of horses much more rapidly than climate changes ever did over those millions of years.

If adaptation takes more then million years then we can also understand how we are creating problems in our horses when we feed diets that are low in fibre and high in concentrate which causes less wear of the teeth. It’s therefore important we keep feeding our horses according how they are designed, providing a basal diet high in fibre.

Read the full article and watch the video by clicking the zinio link.