 In the 15th century, Johann Schiltberger recorded one of the first European sightings of the horses in the journal of his trip to Mongolia as a prisoner of the Mongol Khan.The horse is named after a Russian colonel of Polish descent, Nikolai Przhevalsky (1839–1888) (Nikołaj Przewalski in Polish).He was the explorer and naturalist who first described the horse in 1881, after having gone on an expedition to find it, based on rumors of its existence.