Page 536 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

foundation of the sequence that would be displayed for years in museums and textbooks as supposed proof
of the evolution of today's horse. 122 Some of the genera displayed as the stages of this sequence included
Eohippus, Orohippus, Miohippus, Hipparion and finally the modern-day horse, Equus.
In the next century, this sequence was taken to be proof for the so-called evolution of the horse. The de-

crease in the number of toes and the animal's gradual increase in size were enough to convince evolution-
ists, who for some decades hoped to assemble similar fossil sequences for other creatures. But their hopes
were never fulfilled: They were never able to assemble a sequence for other creatures, as they supposedly
had for the horse.

Moreover, some contradictions became evident, with the attempt to insert newly-excavated fossils into
the horse series. Characteristics of the new finds—where they were discovered, their age, the number of
toes—were incompatible with the sequence and began to undo it. They were inconsistent with the horse se-
ries and turned it into a meaningless assortment of fossils.

Gordon Rattray Taylor, former chief science advisor to BBC Television described the situation:

Perhaps the most serious weakness of Darwinism is the failure of paleontologists to find convincing phyloge-
nies or sequences of organisms demonstrating major evolutionary change. . . The horse is often cited as the only
fully worked-out example. But the fact is that the line from Eohippus to Equus is very erratic. It is alleged to show
a continual increase in size, but the truth is that some of the variants were smaller than Eohippus, not larger.

Specimens from different sources can be brought together in a convincing-looking sequence, but there is no evi-
dence that they were actually ranged in this order in time. 123

He openly admitted that the horse series was based on no proof. Heribert Nilsson, another researcher,
made the same statement, writing that the horse series was "very artificial":

The family tree of the horse is beautiful and continuous only in the textbooks. In the reality provided by the re-
sults of research it is put together from three parts, of which only the last can be described as including horses.
The forms of the first part are just as much little horses as the present day damans are horses.

The construction of the horse is therefore a very artificial one,
since it is put together from non-equivalent parts, and can-
not therefore be a continuous transformation se-

ries. 124
Today, even many

evolutionists reject
the thesis that horses
went through a grad-

Hyracotherium, placed at the ual evolution. In
beginning of the so-called horse November, 1980, a
series, was originally identified
by Richard Owen, an anti- four-day symposium
Darwinist. But later paleontolo- was held at the Field
gists sought to conform this
creature to evolution. Museum of Natural
History in Chicago at-
tended by 150 evolution-
ists. It dealt with the
problems associated

with the theory of a
gradual evolution. A
speaker, the evolution-
ist Boyce Rensberger,

told that there was no
proof in the fossil record
for the scenario of the

534 Atlas of Creation Vol. 3