
Eohippus is an extinct genus of small equid ungulates. The only species is E. angustidens, which was long considered a species of Hyracotherium (now strictly defined as a member of the Palaeotheriidae rather than the Equidae). Its remains have been identified in North America and date to the Early Eocene (Ypresian stage).
Eohippus is an extinct genus of small equid ungulates. The only species is E. angustidens, which was long considered a species of Hyracotherium (now strictly defined as a member of the Palaeotheriidae rather than the Equidae). Its remains have been identified in North America and date to the Early Eocene (Ypresian stage).
==Discovery== thumb|left|Restoration by Charles R. Knight|Charles Knight|226x226px In 1876, Othniel C. Marsh described a skeleton as Eohippus validus, from (, 'dawn') and (, 'horse'), meaning 'dawn horse'. Its similarities with fossils described by Richard Owen were formally pointed out in a 1932 paper by Clive Forster Cooper. E. validus was moved to the genus Hyracotherium, which had priority as the name for the genus, with Eohippus becoming a junior synonym of that genus. Hyracotherium was recently found to be a paraphyletic group of species, and the genus now includes only H. leporinum. E. validus was found to be identical to an earlier-named species, Orohippus angustidens Cope, 1875, and the resulting binomial is thus Eohippus angustidens.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).