The variability of cranial morphology in modern horses.

The study examines the variability of skull morphology in modern horses and how it relates to their body build, citing that horses of different body builds exhibit differences in cranial morphology.

Objective and Methodology

• The fundamental aim of the research was to investigate whether the traits of a horse’s skull demonstrate variability in relation to the physical constitution of the horse. It pursued this by analyzing metric parameters of the skulls from 43 horses, utilizing various statistical techniques such as Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Principal Components Analysis and Canonical Discriminant Analysis.

Analysis and Findings

• Based on the analyses conducted, the study found that horses of different body types do exhibit differences in their cranial morphology. This means that there are noticeable differences in the skull structure, size, shape, and other attributes between horses depending on their body build.
• The research discovered that warm-blooded horses of the respiratory constitutional type have a more intricate nasal cavity compared to horses of a heavier body build. This could be due to environmental adaptation and selective breeding impacting different parts of the skull in disparate ways.
• The study also found that specific features of the horse’s skull had a significant impact on this variability. The length and breadth of the viscerocranium, which is the lower part of the skull housing the mouth and nose, was observed to greatly affect the horse’s craniometric variability.
• Further, the study noted that the height of the viscerocranium, a skull feature of the respiratory tract, showed a high level of discriminating power. This implies that the height of the viscerocranium may be a good indicator to differentiate between the skull structures of horses of varying body builds.