Book explores earliest horses

Horses are often used as the classic example of evolution because of their extensive fossil record.
 According to "The Rise of Horses" (Johns Hopkins University Press, $65), a new book by German paleoanthropologist Jens Lorenz Franzen, the horse species emerged 52 to 55 million years ago with a hare-sized creature called a dawn horse.
 Franzen traces the evolution of the horse’s teeth, brain, hooves and backbone with the help of beautiful full-color charts, photos and graphs on nearly every page. He shows how modern horses we recognize are related to rhinoceroses, zebras and donkeys. In the chapter "Discovering Horse Evolution," the author describes how human eyes and brains were not capable of processing the very fast and complex gallop motion and that only after photographer Eadweard Muybridge created his famous sequence of a horse galloping in the 1870s did we finally understand it.
 Franzen’s starts the book with an anecdote about the first horse he loved, Fanny, who met an untimely end in 1943 when she slid on a snow-covered street, broke her leg and had to be put down. His emotional connection to horses (and his collegiate studies in geology and paleontology) drew him to the animal as a focus of study. This emotional connection might draw readers to Franzen’s book as well, but "The Rise of Horses" is a technical read for evolution enthusiasts only.