Is "Dawn Horse" a Hyrax?

Examining a Common Creationist Claim about Hyracotherium

Michael  Hopkins

Copyright © 2001-2002

[Last Modified: January 3, 2002]

common creationist claim is that Hyracotherium, which is informally called eohippus or "dawn horse," is nothing more than a type of animal called a hyrax. The hyraxes are a group of animals that are alive today and are not horses. Since Hyracotherium is generally considered to be the first "horse" the creationists conclude that this invalidates the commonly presented series of fossils showing horse evolution in specific and shows that evolutionists are incompetent in general.

Let us compare a Hyracotherium with a hyrax:

	Hyracotherium	Hyrax
Image Source:	Romer1	Will's Skull Page
More Images:	Skeleton	Two Large Skull Images Another skull
Length of Imaged Skull:	5.3 Inches	2.9 Inches
Dental Formula:2	3 . 1 . 4 . 3 3 . 1 . 4 . 3	1 . 0 . 4 . 3 2 . 0 . 4 . 3
Tail:	Long	Very Short

As you can plainly see, Hyracotherium is not a hyrax. I would further point out that paleontologists do know what hyraxes look like since they have described many of them from the fossil record, often in the same books where they describe fossil horses. For reference, one can find images of modern horse skulls here and here while images of more fossil horses can be found here.

Creationists sometimes mention that Sir Richard Owen, the man who first described a Hyracotherium fossil, named it after a hyrax in 1841 as if this justified their conclusion. Stephen Jay Gould³ wrote about Owen's naming of Hyracotherium:

He did not recognize its relationship with horses (he considered this animal, as his chosen name implies, to be a possible relative of hyraxes, a small group of Afro-Asian mammals, the "coneys" of the Bible). In this original article, Owen likened his fossil to a hare in one passage and to something between a hog and a hyrax in another....

Thus I really don't think that Owen's naming of the creature was really that strong a thing to lean on in the first place. (And of course the creationists could have tried to find a picture of a hyrax skull themselves.)

There is a variant version of this claim. Lawrence O. Richards⁴ wrote:

Today no evolutionist thinks that the "short-necked creatures not much bigger than a domestic cat" is related to the modern horse at all. The fossil called Eohippus, or Dawn Horse, is now considered to be a close relative of the rock rabbit!

The hyrax, which creationists usually claim that Hyracotherium is, has now been transformed into a rock rabbit (click here to see a skull)! "rEvolutionary Thinking Where Do We Come From Really? A Critical Analysis of the Scientific Evidence for Evolution" (the "rEvolutionary" is not a typo) copies large portions of what Richards wrote including the section in question. A different page on the same web site claims it is "indistinguishable" from a hyrax. So we have a web site that claims Hyracotherium is a rabbit on one page and a hyrax on another! A dentist by the name of Wm. T. Greenshaw repeats the claim by plagiarizing Richards via verbatim copying without giving credit whatsoever. The Richards book received the Gold Medallion Book Award "in recognition of excellence in evangelical Christian literature." John N. Moore of the Creation Research Society is listed as a consulting editor. And yet the book is just incredibly inaccurate. Richards falsely claims that some evolutionists think that a reptile laid an egg that hatched into a fully developed bird and illustrates the claim with a picture of a bird hatching from an egg laid by a dinosaur though the creature illustrated is a mammal-like reptile. Richards falsely claims that hemoglobin is "exactly the same" in all species with it. In reality the hemoglobin of different species is different unless extremely closely related and these differences can be used to trace the course of evolution though today DNA data is used more often. Richards falsely claims that carbon-14 decays into carbon-12 when in reality it decays into nitrogen-14 via beta decay. This book has many other errors like this.

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