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The trouble with horse evolution

‘I admit that an awful lot of that has gotten into the textbooks as though it were true. For instance, the most famous example still on exhibit downstairs (in the American Museum) is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps 50 years ago. That has been presented as literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that that is lamentable, particularly because the people who propose these kinds of stories themselves may be aware of the speculative nature of some of the stuff. But by the time it filters down to the textbooks, we’ve got science as truth and we’ve got a problem.’

– Dr. Niles Eldredge, curator at the American Museum of Natural History, in a recorded interview with Luther Sunderland, published in Darwin’s Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems, Master Books, El Cajon, California, USA.