11.14.2012

Whinny

I love museums. This past weekend I visited a natural history museum that had an exhibit on horses. It showed their skeletal structure, how they have evolved, the similarities and differences between Equidae and the other remaining members of the order Perissodactyla (tapirs[!] and elephants[!]), and the part they  have played in the civilization of man. We would be a very different world if horses had not been domesticated in Asia and Europe thousands of years ago.

One section of the exhibit mentioned that although horses originated in the Americas, they became extinct there 8-10,000 years ago, and were reintroduced to these continents by European explorers in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. This wasn't presented with a lot of fuss. It wasn't presented as any kind of controversial viewpoint. It wasn't prefaced as something "some scientists think" happened. It's just a fact, plain and simple, and was presented as such. No one walking through the exhibit would have thought twice about it. Unless they were an ex-Mormon. Then they, like me, would have stopped and smirked. They would have snapped a photo of the placard. They would have stored it away as a "fun fact" to share with their family when asked about how their trip to the museum had been.

If you are a Mormon and don't know why this story is posted on an ex-Mormon blog, think about it. Think about it until you get it. Your brain was made to think.