Horse fossils fake?
A fellow educator at my place of work mentioned to me recently that they had learned that the horse fossils were fake (so basically I shouldn’t be mentioning these fossils to my students).
Never having heard this claim before, I simply replied that I had never heard that and would have to look that up for myself.
Of course, it looks to be another typical creationist/intelligent design claim which has no bearing in reality whatsoever.
Visit Talk Origins’ Fossil Horse FAQ to learn more.
In any case, I am interested in where this person heard that, and what exactly they meant by “fake”. Has anyone else ever heard this claim before? In what way, exactly, are creationists claiming these fossils to be fake? Are they saying the fossils themselves are not actual fossils, the fossils aren’t from the animals we think they are from (I know that is the case with Hyracotherium, which they claim is a hyrax), or something else?
Of course, even if the fossils WERE fake (in whatever way) that would not refute evolution as this point only involves one small piece of evolutionary evidence.
Like this post? Email it to a friend.
Blog of the Airtightnoodle 
April 10, 2008 at 4:03 pm
I see you have no comments yet so I’ll take a crack at it.
The horse fossils are mentioned in the book Icons of Evolution as being misleading because they do not form a linear series from one to the other and are not found in a linear chronology. This is probably what your colleague heard and misunderstood. This has no relevance to the teaching of horse evolution using these fossils because we do not suppose that horse evolution was a linear process, but branching, and the fossils found represent members of these branches.
Basically, much ado about nothing.