Logan Ramsey
Associate Editor
The “Incredible Horse” exhibit in the Idaho Museum of Natural History has been open since Jan. 2018 and museum officials say it educates the evolution of the horse in North America.
But the exhibit is set to close in Jan. 2019, meaning people only have a couple more months to see the exhibit before it closes at the beginning of next semester.
Before Europeans brought horses to the Americas, horses such as the Hagerman Horse evolved and developed in North America but went extinct about 10,000 years ago.
“It follows the evolution, extinction, and return of the horse in North America,” Amber Tews, Anthropology Collections Manager at the museum, said earlier this year.
Tews said that people often don’t realize horses were on the North American continent before Europeans started bringing them over and the exhibit educates this topic well.
“Sometimes we don’t realize that they did evolve here and then they went extinct during the ice age,” Tews said.
Tew’s favorite part of the exhibit is the interactive skeletal casts section that “fleshes out,” what the horses would’ve looked like by projecting the full body on the cast through a tablet screen.
“It’s not very often that you get to see a skeletal mount fleshed out to what they looked like,” Tews said.
The exhibit shows the horse’s evolution, including their feet evolving from toes to hooves.
One of the cast’s hooves are 3-D printed, and Virginia Jones, an education specialist with the museum, says that’s a safer way to make models of skeletons, rather than make casts.
The exhibit also features real fossils of the Hagerman Horse. The fossils are on display in a glass case.
Jones said animals tend to go towards watering places when they’re dying, and that’s where they found the Hagerman Horse remains.
Some of the Hagerman Horse fossils can also be found in the Smithsonian.
The exhibit also focuses on the connection between the horse and Idaho.
“Being in Idaho, we have a very long tradition of connections with horses,” Tews said.
Horses first returned to North America when the Spanish landed in Texas in the late 16th century. Some of the horses that they brought over escaped, and within 50 years “horse culture” spread all across North America.
According to Tews, the Shoshone and Bannock tribes were one of the first groups to get the horse and adopt it into their culture.
Jones said that once the tribes started using horses, the way they hunted and traveled changed.
“Once they had a horse to use for transportation they could go farther to go on hunts, and they didn’t have to move everything with them,” Jones said.
Jones said that the Native Americans could carry more of their items and possessions with them when they traveled. They could also bring more back with them when coming home.
Jones also said the size of their tents and tipis doubled because they could carry more than they ever had before.
