[edmundsauto]

Also, some of the numbers don't seem that big in context. But this situation is 7 million years - plenty of time for evolution to make lots of changes! It just doesn't seem like that big of a gap when we talk about hundreds of millions of years.

The scale is astonishing.

[082349872349872]

In a much more recent, much smaller gap, horses originated in North America but died out there, only to be later reintroduced from the Old World.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_horse

> "The evolution of the horse, a mammal of the family Equidae, occurred over a geologic time scale of 50 million years, ... Much of this evolution took place in North America, where horses originated but became extinct about 10,000 years ago."

[lisper]

Yep. 7 million years is a little under 0.2% of the age of the earth.

[andi999]

Although the first 20% were useless in terms of life.