Matthew's Evolution of the Horse

     In 1907, J.W. Gidley was the first to depict the family tree of the family Equidae as a branching structure with the coexistence of different genera (MacFadden 1992). It was William Dither Matthew, however, who became more known for his branching phylogeny of Equidae (MacFadden 1992). Matthew's phylogeny (published in 1930), while branching, still centered on a main line leading from Hyracotherium to Equus, with various side branches that he considered no more than evolutionary mistakes, or dead-ends (Gould 1987).

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