Prehistoric Significance of a Przewalski Stallion

[Takama]

 ok, I seen a few shops suggest a Przewalski Stallion as a prehistoric horse.     Now my question is, Is it really a living fossil?  or is it just a horse with primitive features?

BTW I had no idea were to put this thread. Feel free to move if Dinosaurs is not the right place.

[SBell]

'Living fossil' is meaningless--technically, everything alive is representative of something from the fossil record (right up there with 'missing links' for overused and unnecessary terms). For a good, angry diatribe about this, read the book Earth Before the Dinosaurs; he goes off for quite a while on it (if you can read it in the original French, I bet the language is even more colourful).

As for the prehistoircness (!) of the Przewalski horse--sort of? It's a more primitive relative of the modern domestic horse, and would be a good representative of other, extinct Equus (at least in the vague subgenus Equus. So, it makes a good stand in until someone makes E. lambei or E. scotti  (hint: that will probably never happen), in particular if you add a bit of striping, at least to the legs (which appears to be the primitive state for equine patterns).

[CityRaptor]

Well, "Primitve Features" in this case means "was never domesticated". So I think of them more like wolves or wildcats

[Dinoguy2]

'Living fossil' is meaningless

Yeah, the term "living fossil" needs to go away. It's a relic of a time before we had a decent understanding of how evolution works and just confuses people.

The classic example is the "coelacanth" (a name that covers an entire order of fish!). Modern coelacanths, genus Latimeria, is not known from a single fossil specimen. So it's the opposite of a living fossil. Lazarus taxon is more appropriate in this case, for a species with a long gap in its fossil record (ghost lineage).

Przewalski's horse is interesting because it's a primitive/ancestral horse, just as wolves are primitive dogs, junglefowl are primitive chickens, or aurochs were primitive cattle.

But, note that things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiang Kiang and Zebras are even more distantly related to domestic horses.

[Everything_Dinosaur]

We added the Przewalski's Horse/Stallion into our product range as we were keen to encourage Collecta to broaden their range of prehistoric mammal models.  There has been some interesting research done into the genome of Equus, some scientists believe that the divergence in the horse family that led to the separation of the Przewalski's horse from the ancestry of the modern domestic horse took place around 160,000 years ago, other data suggests a more recent split.  We have written several articles on these studies on the Everything Dinosaur blog: Ancient Horse Bone Yields Genetic Data

We have also written a couple of reviews which are on the Everything Dinosaur blog, one written an one video review: Przewalski's Stallion Reviewed

Just search in the Everything Dinosaur blog for "Przewalski" and up should come all the relevant articles. Hope this helps.