Page 535 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

Harun Yahya

ONCE, THERE WAS THE

"HORSE SERIES" SCENARIO

hen Darwin was proposing his theory, there were no intermediate forms to support it, but he
hoped that some would be discovered in the future. To remedy this vital deficiency, paleontol-
W ogists who believed in Darwinism put together a set of horse fossils found in North America to
form a sequence. Despite the fact that there appeared to be no intermediate forms in the fossil record, the
Darwinists thought that they had come up with a great success.

One of the most important pieces of this sequence had already been discovered before Darwinism. In
1841, the English paleontologist Sir Richard Owen found a fossil belonging to a small mammal and, in-
spired by its similarity to the hyrax, a small fox-like creature found in Africa, he called it Hyracotherium.

The hyrax's skeleton was almost identical to Owen's finding, except for its skull and the tail.
As they did with other fossils, paleontologists who adopted Darwinism began to evaluate
Hyracotherium from an evolutionist point of view. In 1874, the Russian paleontologist Vladimir
Kovalevsky tried to establish a relationship between Hyracotherium and horses. In 1879, two well-known
evolutionists of the time carried this enterprise further and compiled the horse series which was to re-

main on the Darwinist agenda for years to come. The American paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh,
together with Thomas Huxley (known as Darwin's bulldog), devised a chart by arranging some hoofed
fossils according to tooth structure and the number of toes in foreleg and hind leg. In the process, to

stress the idea of evolution, Owen's Hyracotherium was renamed eohippus which means "dawn horse."
Their claims together with their charts were published in the American Journal of Science and laid the

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