Horse
The horse adapted to survive in areas of wide-open terrain with sparse vegetation, surviving in an ecosystem where other large grazing animals, especially ruminants, could not. Horses and other equids are odd-toed ungulates of the order Perissodactyla, a group of mammals that was dominant during the Tertiary period. In the past, this order contained 14 families, but only three—Equidae (the horse and related species), Tapiridae (the tapir), and Rhinocerotidae (the rhinoceroses)—have survived to the present day.
Fauna of South Africa
Herbivores which are not artiodactyls also occur in the region. There are two native species of equids in the country, the plains zebra and the mountain zebra. An extinct subspecies of the plains zebra, the quagga, was endemic to the country.