European horses must have been
cooked and eaten in the caves of Sayab, Lara, and Chekt-a-leh since the
fifteenth century, to account for the fragments of bone and teeth discovered
there; for we find no reason for supposing that the people of Yucatan knew the
American fossil horse, or scattered its remains in late portions of their
culture-layers. (Henry C. Mercer, The Hill-Caves of Yucatan: A Search for
Evidence of Man’s Antiqutiy in the Caverns of Central America Being an Account
of the Corwith Expedition of the Department of Archaeology and Palaeontology of
the University of Pennsylvania [Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company,
1896], 172)
The horse molars and bones found
by Mr. Mercer might, so far as their structural characters go, be referred to
the Equus occidentalis, Leidy, which differs from the E. caballus
in characters of the skull, while the molar teeth are closely similar. E.
occidentalis is, however, found in association with a different fauna in
the valley of Mexico and Western North America, and its bones are always
fossilized, which is not the case with the specimens found by Mr. Mercer.—E. D.
COPE. (Ibid., 172 n. 1)