🐎Horse

Equus caballus Linnaeus, 1758

The horse is a domesticated, one-toed, hoofed mammal. It belongs to the taxonomic family Equidae and is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature, Eohippus, into the large single-toed animal of today, originally in North America. Humans began domesticating horses around 4000 BCE in Central Asia, primarily associated with the Botai culture; and their domestication is believed to have been widespread by 3000 BCE. Horses in the subspecies caballus are domesticated, although some domesticated populations live in the wild as feral horses. These feral populations are not true wild horses, which are horses that have never been domesticated. There is an extensive, specialized vocabulary used to describe equine-related concepts, covering everything from anatomy to life stages, size, colors, markings, breeds, locomotion, and behavior.

Text: Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

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1,365

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Measurements

vs you

≈ 4.8× your weight

Conservation status

Not evaluated

The IUCN Red List has not assessed Equus ferus caballus yet.

Key measurements

Body mass: 300 kg
Body length: not recorded
Shoulder height: 1.61 m
Top speed: 64 km/h
Bite force: not recorded
Maximum lifespan: 57 years

All measurements ↓

Facts and figures

Everything we know about the Horse

Typical adult figures. Where a value is an estimate rather than a measurement, it says so.

Body mass

300 kg

AnAge

Details ↓

data quality: high

Source: AnAge · AnAge build 15, 2023-07-03 (HAGR) · CC BY 3.0

Shoulder height

1.61 m1.55–1.67 m · typical range

Details ↓

Height at the withers, riding horses. Overall domestic range spans 0.86-1.67+ m across breeds. NOTE: the Mammalian Species horse account's 120-146 cm is Przewalski's horse, not the domestic horse.

Source: Masko et al. 2022, Animals 12(7):931 · see citation

Top speed

64 km/h

Details ↓

Sprint over a short distance, not a sustained pace. Compilations give 63.97 and 68.04 km/h. The fastest officially timed racehorse is 70.35 km/h over two furlongs (Winning Brew, Penn National, 2008) -- a record, not a typical animal. Hirt's 88 km/h is speedofanimals.com.

Source: Christiansen 2002, Zool J Linn Soc 136:685 and Bejan & Marden 2006, J Exp Biol 209:238; compiled in Hirt et al. 2017, Nat Ecol Evol 1:1116, Supplementary Data · see citation

Maximum lifespan

57 years

AnAge

Details ↓

data quality: high

Source: AnAge · AnAge build 15, 2023-07-03 (HAGR) · CC BY 3.0

Gestation

337 days

AnAge

Details ↓

data quality: high

Source: AnAge · AnAge build 15, 2023-07-03 (HAGR) · CC BY 3.0