Scott's Horse

Scott's horse, Equus scotti, is an extinct species of horse native to Pleistocene North America, named after the vertebrate paleontologist William Berryman Scott. It was a true caballine horse, more closely related to the modern horse and wild horse than to zebras and asses, and it lived alongside the stilt-legged equines of the genus Haringtonhippus. The earliest remains date to the late Blancan in the Early Pleistocene and the youngest to about 12,000 years ago in the Late Pleistocene. It was named from Rock Creek in Texas, where several skeletons were found, and fossils occur across Alberta, Ontario, Saskatchewan and Yukon in Canada and in California, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas in the United States. Ancient DNA shows that North American horses diverged from Eurasian ones about 800,000 years ago.