The Australian stock horse (Intiate & plan #2-4)
The Australian Stock Horse is a unique horse breed that was chosen to take a deeper look into, as well as three adaptations: body size, foot structure, and the location of the eyes. These adaptations will be used later to predict the evolutionary changes that the Australian stock horse might undergo in an environment isolated from humans. The chosen geographical area for the horse breed was Australia and the evolutionary time period was the Eons about 1,225 years ago. Australia is an island surrounded by water, near the Pacific and Indian Ocean. It has a geographic size of 2.97 square miles. Australia is well known for its “outback” remote lands of the interior. The desert outback covers most of the interior; however, it is too dry, hot, and barren to support many people. Eastern Australia has large areas of grass lands used primarily for sheep and cattle ranches. Australia also has some mountainous areas and plateaus scattered throughout the continent and also many coastal beaches. Over 70% of people in Australia currently live in cities or town and most of this population live on the eastern and southern coast, and around Perth in the west coast. Most of the land in Australia is too dry for crop plantation, but some areas do grow grapes, wheat, and sugar cane. Much of Australia has a continental climate; temperatures get hot during the day and then drop significantly at night. It is also very barren and dry in Australia since it gets very little rain.