Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A hyracotherium.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A genus of Eocene horses, representing the oldest known type of the family Equidæ, founded by Marsh (1876) upon remains from the coryphodon-beds of the Lower Eocene of New Mexico, indicating a kind of horse about as large as a fox, with four toes and a half on each fore foot, all incased in horn and forming hoofs, and three hoofed toes on each hind foot.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun an extinct primitive dog-sized 4-toed Eocene mammal, the earliest horse known in the line of descent of the modern horse. It is classed in the extinct genus Hydracotherium. Called also
dawn horse .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun
Extinct earlyEocene mammal , Hyracotherium leporinum
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun earliest horse; extinct primitive dog-sized four-toed Eocene animal
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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The Valley somehow has various beasties from pre-history including the eohippus and the allosaurus.
More fun with Harryhausen Tripp 2009
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Unlike gastornids the ones you always see in kids books flogging the dead eohippus, phorusrhacids had runner's legs.
Big Bird 2006
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But a new class of horse stepped forward, shouldering its way between a sturdy Morgan and a deerlike eohippus.
Into the Thinking Kingdoms Foster, Alan Dean, 1946- 1999
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But a new class of horse stepped forward, shouldering its way between a sturdy Morgan and a deerlike eohippus.
Into the Thinking Kingdoms Foster, Alan Dean, 1946- 1999
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He had put that together with the discovery that common chickens and other creatures could be regressed to their saurian ancestors'the pioneering work had already been done on the eohippus and aurochs-and had seen a goldmine waiting for both the zoos and GenTech.
Fiddler Fair Lackey, Mercedes 1998
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And so they taught the whole -- the dinosaurs, and we went and looked at Yale, they had the eohippus, the little horse evolving into the big horse, and all of that.
The Theme is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition 1995
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But the thing that marked eohippus and made one suspect that this family of animals might be headed in some important direction was the feet.
Centennial Michener, James 1974
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But what gained greatest attention, especially from ranchers in the west, was his discovery in subsequent years of handsome skeletons of four of the progenitors of the horse: eohippus, mesohippus, miohippus and the crucial, determinative merychippus.
Centennial Michener, James 1974
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This year, in Pleistocene clay beds I myself found the jaw of an eohippus; it shone in my hand like a little jewel, and just north of Chalk Cliff, in a classic Morrison deposit, I had the thrill of finding an entire armored collar that triceratops carried about his neck, erecting it into a formidable defense whenever some predator attacked.
Centennial Michener, James 1974
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"Paleohippus, " of the many capacities, eohippus of the subtle form, merychippus with the horse-like appearance, pliohippus with the single hoof'these attributes persisted; there were dozens of other variations equally interesting which died out because they did not contribute to the final form.
Centennial Michener, James 1974
Prolagus commented on the word eohippus
Now called Hyracotherium.
April 29, 2008
chained_bear commented on the word eohippus
(just putting brackets on it for the link)
Hyracotherium
September 4, 2008