The Colombian horse

A horse of the Pleistocene, of course. This is the skull and mandible of a large specimen found in the 1930s near to Cerro Gordo in the Bogotá savanna, in the center of Colombia, and deposited in the museum of  the La Salle University in Bogotá. It has been classified in its own species, Equus (Amerhippus) lasallei, but the taxonomy of the South American horses is fantastically complicated, with a lot of species that are not longer considered valid; the last analysis suggests that E. lasallei is synonym of another species, E. neogeus. Even has been proposed that all the South American species of Equus are an only variable species! In any case, as I said before, this skull is large, the biggest recorded for South America: it measures 61 cm, comparable to the skull of the largest modern wild equid, the Grévy's zebra (Equus grevyi). E. neogeus is associated to relatively open dry zones with prairies, like the cold Bogota savanna during the late glacial period.

The image showed here is redrawn from the reconstruction of De Porta (1960), but with a longer nasal based in other specimens of E. neogeus.

References:

- De Porta, J. (1960). Los équidos fósiles de la sabana de Bogotá. Boletín de Geología, 4.