Fossils Solves Mystery of Ancestry of Horses and rhinos

A team of paleontologists has discovered fossils in India which have unraveled the mystery of the ancestry of horses and rhinos.

The team believes that the fossils are of  a common ancestor of all Perissodactyla, the odd toed  animals.

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University  and colleagues found the remains at the edge of a coal mine in the western state of Gujarat in India. They concluded that the fossils belonged to  Cambaytherium thewissi.

The Cambaytherium thewissi is classified as an early perissodoctyl, which is the same order as tapirs, horses, hippopotamus, and rhinos. Till date there was little evidence of the shared common ancestry or origins of these animals but the evidence collected strengthens the theory

The Cambaytherium skeleton recently assembled was estimated to have lived 54.5 million years ago. It is believed the Indian subcontinent was still an island then and drifting toward  Asia.

The discovery offers information on evolution of life during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, a time when the Earth warmed and grazing herd animals appeared alongside primates. Ken Rose, professor of functional anatomy and evolution at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine called the creature a "cousin" of all living perissodactyls, reports Betawired

The skeletal remains suggest that the animal weighed somewhere between 45 pounds and 75 pounds and resembled a much smaller version of both a horse and a rhino. It  had five toes on each foot, which would eventually become hooves.

Very little is known about the evolution of Perissondactyls. Remains of this order dating back 56 million years have been found in other parts of the world  but this discovery fills in a knowledge gap regarding the background of horses and other modern Perissondactyls, said the research team.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.