There used to be rhinos in North America. In fact, they originated on the continent. The earliest ones didn’t look like the large, thick-skinned beasts we know today. No, if you were to wander through the humid forests of Wyoming or Utah around 50 million years ago, the closest thing to a rhino that you’d see would be a slender, pony-sized mammal that paleontologists know as Hyrachyus. And speaking of ponies, some of the earliest horses wandered the same forests – Eohippus and other horses that stood on several hoofed toes and were the size of a small dog – as well as the first tapirs.

Rhinos, horses, and tapirs are all perissodactyls. Roughly speaking, that means that they’re all hoofed