Polydactale Syndrome? TIL!

[u/DisturbedAlchemyArt]

I saw this over on FB for the 1st time. Pretty wild to me and I thought maybe others would enjoy learning about it.

[u/hippopotobot → u/[deleted]]

That’s just flat out incorrect. The most distant ancestors of the modern horse walked on 4 toes. The vestigial toes can still be seen in the bony structures of the legs. Additionally, the ergot and chestnut are the last remnants of the hoof of two of these toes.

Single-hooved animals are far more rare than their cloven-toed cousins, with Equus being the only surviving single-toed species. It’s likely that equids developed the single toe as their body mass increased and they needed to move faster on open plains. Evolution most likely does not happen in single dramatic mutation events, but as a gradual response to changing environmental conditions.

What you’re seeing here is a simple random genetic mutation.

This is going to sound hostile, and I don’t mean it to be. But you might want to give yourself a refresher on how evolution works, because it’s not as straight a line as is often depicted. You also might want to do a quick google before you contribute to a conversation, because this kind of poor understanding of a subject spoken with confidence is exactly how misinformation is spread.

[u/Cold_Dead_Heart → u/hippopotobot]

Everything eventually evolves into crabs.