Everything Horses Ltd.

31/08/2026

24/08/2026

Wow

🐴 A single leg bone frozen in Yukon permafrost holds the oldest genome ever sequenced from any living thing.

It was found at Thistle Creek in the Yukon. A horse bone, locked in frozen ground for so long that nobody seriously expected usable DNA to survive inside it. But permafrost is a remarkable preservative, and the researchers pulled a complete genome out of it.

The age came back at roughly 700,000 years.

The work was led by Ludovic Orlando and Eske Willerslev and published in Nature in June 2013, and it did more than set a record. It pushed the origin of the horse family back to around four million years ago, far deeper in time than anyone had previously established.

So the next time you are standing at a fence watching a horse graze, remember you are looking at a lineage that was already ancient before our own species existed. Whole ice ages arrived and melted away while that leg bone lay waiting in the ground for someone to come and read it.

Does knowing how old the horse family is change the way you see them?

22/08/2026

Horse gear for sale!
Contact Pat or Sam
Location henley brook.

19/08/2026

Fortunately this was not me as a kid, I didn’t get my mobility issues until 20 years ago

18/08/2026

Interesting