Shy, Water Loving Tapirs Have Kept Their Primitive Shape for 20 Million Years

Although the horses evolved dramatically over the millennia, their relatives the tapirs changed very little. The modern forms are much the same as Protapirus, a tapir that lived throughout Europe during the early Oligocene epoch about 35 million years ago.

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Although the horses evolved dramatically over the millennia, their relatives the tapirs changed very little. The modern forms are much the same as Protapirus, a tapir that lived throughout Europe during the early Oligocene epoch about 35 million years ago. The basic reason for this is that tapirs never made the move out of the forests and onto the open grasslands. They kept their browsing habits and body shape while other ungulates had to adapt to a diet of grass and develop the capacity for sustained speed in order to escape predators.

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Since tapirs still rely on the diet of leaves eaten by the earliest ungulates, their teeth have changed little, and are quite primitive compared to the complex chewing teeth of animals such as horses. Yet tapirs are not entirely unspecialized, for they have evolved one feature that makes them very efficient browsers – a short, mobile extension of the upper lip that performs much the same functions as an elephant’s trunk. It can be used to probe the tapir’s surroundings, haul down branches and tear away the foliage, although all these functions are restricted by the length of the snout, which is no more than 17cm.

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Although at first glance a tapir looks rather like a cross between a pig and an elephant, its affinities with horses become more apparent when it is seen in action. It has swift, agile movements, and a very horse-like way of snorting air out of its nostrils. It also leaps into cover. It is probable that the early ancestors of the modern horses resembled tapirs both physically and in their behavior, and the two types began to diverge only when the grasslands tempted the horse out of the forests and into the open.


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