The year 2026 is the Year of the Horse in the Chinese zodiac, and scientists have welcomed a long-lost relative back to the equine family tree.
A China-US research team has, for the first time, reconstructed the full appearance of an extinct ancient horse known as Equus ovodovi, giving a face to a species that puzzled scientists for over a century.
On Sept 10, Jilin University in Jilin province unveiled a 3D image of the animal — a brown-furred creature about the size of a donkey. According to the university, its bioarchaeology laboratory used ancient DNA data and comparative anatomy to carry out the reconstruction in collaboration with US company Evolutio LLC.
This joint work fills a gap in what this animal looked like and establishes a complete research chain from ancient DNA to visual reconstruction, according to the university.
The horse fossils, dating back roughly 40,000 years, were first found in a cave in southwestern Siberia, Russia. Initially, only broken jawbones and teeth were discovered, without a complete skull.
Over the years, researchers have also unearthed related fossils in North America, Africa, Siberia, and northeastern China. However, because the bones were scattered fragments, the animal's true appearance had remained a mystery for more than 100 years.
In 2022, Chinese researchers at Jilin University and Northwest University in Shaanxi province successfully extracted high-quality gene data from the fossils. Building on that work, they worked with American researchers in 2026, comparing the fossil data with living species, such as the Asian wild donkey and domestic horse. They reconstructed the skeleton, built the muscle structure, and eventually re-created the animal's full appearance.
The study shows that the "returned horse" is a fourth independent lineage of the equine family tree, alongside horses, zebras and donkeys. It split off roughly 2.7 million to 2.3 million years ago. Genetically, it is more closely related to donkeys and zebras than to domestic horses. It notes that this horse survived into the Bronze Age before eventually going extinct.
Lead researcher Cai Dawei of Jilin University says that genetic data can only tell what this animal was and when it disappeared, but with evidence from its bones and body shape, "scientists can understand this extinct species as a complete organism, from its skeleton to its physical appearance".
Evolutio LLC says every stage of the workflow was grounded in verifiable scientific data, and the resulting model can be used for both research and science education.
The research team expects the reconstruction will help the public gain an intuitive understanding of an extinct horse that once coexisted with humans.
