Global Warming Made First Tiny Horses Even Smaller
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Global warming 50 million years ago caused the first horses, already tiny in stature compared with present-day animals, to shrink 30 percent to about 8.5 pounds, the size of a house cat today, a study suggests.
Later, as the climate cooled, the horse called Sifrhippus began to grow in size, according to research in the journal Science. Scientists used fossilized teeth to make the size estimates.