Plesippus
| Plesippus | ||||||||||||
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Mounted skeleton of Plesippus shoshonensis . |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Upper Pliocene to Upper Pleistocene | ||||||||||||
| 4.9 million years to 300,000 years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Plesippus | ||||||||||||
| Matthew , 1924 | ||||||||||||
Plesippus (composed of Greek : plesio - "almost, approximately" and hippos - "horse") is an extinct genus fromthe horse family ( Equidae ). The best-known site of the genus, the Hagerman Fossil Beds , is in what is now the US state of Idaho . The animals found there were originally described under the name Equus simplicidens , but are now called Plesippus shoshonensis . The species lived here around 3.5 million years ago in the Pliocene . With an estimated body weight of 425 kg on average, Plesippus shoshonensis was roughly the size of a modern-day Arabian horse . About 2.5 million years ago, Plesippus came from North America to Eurasia . The exact parentage and the relationship with the later horses of the genus Equus have not yet been clarified.
literature
- Jens Lorenz Franzen: The primeval horses of the dawn. Origin and evolution of horses. Elsevier / Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Munich et al. 2007, ISBN 978-3-8274-1680-3
