Kingdom Animalia Class Mammalia Family Equidae Scientific name Equus yunnanensis | Phylum Chordata Order Perissodactyla Genus Equus Rank Species | |
Similar Equus namadicus, Equus francisci, Equus fraternus, Equus scotti, Equus lambei | ||
The Yunnan horse (Equus yunnanensis) was an extinct horse that once roamed in Pleistocene East Asia very likely as a grazer on open tracts of grassland. It was a small horse comparable in size to the modern Przewalski's horse.
It was first described by Edwin H. Colbert from dental fossils collected by Walter W. Granger in the Ma Kai Valley in northern Yunnan ten miles south of the town of Ma kai in Guangnan County as part of the program of the Central Asiatic Expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History in the winter of 1926–1927. They were the most numerous fossils of a single type of animal in the Ma Kai Valley deposits.
Edwin H. Colbert thought it almost identical with an Equus collected by Teilhard de Chardin in the Upper Irrawaddy sediments of Burma: "Indeed, judging by the evidence at hand, these two representations of the genus, one in Burma and one in Yunnan appear to be cospecific".