Horses in South America

During the second Beagle survey expedition between 1831 and 1836, the young naturalist Charles Darwin had remarkable success with fossil hunting in Patagonia. Most of Darwin’s exploration was on land, covering 39 months on land, and 18 months at sea. At Punta Alta in Argentina, he made a major find of gigantic fossils of extinct mammals, then known from only a very few specimens. He ably collected and made detailed observations of plants and animals, with results that shook his belief that species were fixed and provided the basis for ideas, which came to him when back in England, and led to his theory of evolution by natural selection.

However, on October 10, 1833 at Santa Fe Argentina, he was "filled with astonishment" when he found a horse's tooth in the same stratum as a fossilized casing of a huge armadillo embedded in rock. He was puzzled to find a horse tooth in the same rock layer, since it was understood that horses had only come to the Americas in the 16th century. He thought that the tooth had been washed down from a later layer, but concluded that this was "not very probable.”

After the expedition returned in 1836, the anatomist Richard Owen confirmed the tooth was from an extinct species, and remarked that "This evidence of the former existence of a genus, which, as regards South America, had become extinct, and has a second time been introduced into that Continent, is not one of the least interesting fruits of Mr. Darwin's palæontological discoveries. In addition, Lund and Clausen discovered the existence of a fossil horse in the caves of Brazil in South America.

That is, the horse that had become extinct in eras past in South America, had been reintroduced in some manner to the Continent as the tooth showed. While the evolutionist believes that horses evolved from a smaller, less complex animal, most LDS people know that the horse was introduced into the world in its basic present form as the Lord has said.

The point is, the horse was found to exist in South America not long ago and much later than it was believed to be extinct. How the horse was reintroduced onto the South American continent, the biologist and evolutionist do not know, but that it was found there before the Spanish arrived, and much later than the extinction was believed to have occurred, it can only be concluded that the horse was in South America at a time when no one had believed it to exist.

As Owen himself reported: “In the account of the Mammalian Remains brought from South America in the voyage of the Beagle, I described and figured an upper molar tooth as belong to a species of Equus; and this tooth, having been found by Mr. Darwin imbedded in the quartz shingle of cemented pebbles at Punta Alta in Habia Blanca, together with remains of Megatherium, Meglonyx, Myolodon and Scelidotherium, I concluded not to be a tooth of a horse imported by Europeans into South America, but to have belonged to an Equine species which had coexisted with those large Megatherioids and had, with them, become extinct.”

Fossil remains of Equus, the first “true horse,” have been discovered in Asia, Europe, and Africa, as well as throughout North and South America. The so-called “extinction of the horse” to the scientist, after such along period of existence, is considered one of the great unsolved mysteries of history.

Of course, to the Lord, this is no mystery. The horse in the Western Hemisphere, as well as everywhere else, succumbed to the Great Flood, and only those Noah took with him on the Ark survived, to be reintroduced into the Western Hemisphere by the Jaredites, and utilized by the Nephites.