Miocene (Pt 7): Hornless Rhinos, Long-Tusked Elephants, and Three-toed Horses

Anancus arvernensis

As the climate cooled around 11 million years ago, the forests of Europe began to thin out once more, something that favoured fast-running animals such as horses. Until this time, the only kind of horse in Europe, however, was the small, three-toed, Anchitherium, which was likely adapted to dense woodland and not so suited to the new climate. Its own ancestors had reached the continent from the east, having crossed over during one of the periodic rises of the Bering Land Bridge, but now, not coincidentally, given the colder climate, the Land Bridge rose again, and a second kind of horse followed it out of the Americas.

Pliocene (Pt 10): Before There Were Zebras

At the dawn of the Pliocene, Africa, like Europe, was a much wetter place than it is today. As a result, it was also much greener, a place of lusher vegetation, and the animals that fed on it. While that likely made little difference to the heart of the Congo jungle and to the more tropical reaches of West Africa, which are about as green as they're going to get, elsewhere the changes would have be obvious to any putative time traveller.

The biggest difference was likely in the north, where the even the very heart of what is now the Sahara Desert was likely covered in arid scrubland - hardly hospitable, but a significant improvement over baking hot dune-fields. By one estimate, moist savannah and open woodland stretched as far north as 21°, covering what are now countries like Chad, Sudan, and Mauritania. Further east, Somalia would also have been covered by woodland, rather than its current dry grasslands, and, at the opposite end of the continent, there may have been small forests in what are now the Namib Desert and the Kalahari.

It didn't last, of course. Around 3 million years ago, as the world fell irrevocably into the long autumn of the late Pliocene, Africa became not only cooler, but drier. And, if the generally cooler climate did not make too much difference to a continent sitting on the equator, the loss of rain certainly did. It's at this time that the Sahara, and the other deserts we are familiar with today, began to form, and the wildlife had to either adapt to that fact, or die. What was good news for voles in Europe, promoting the tougher grasses on which they thrive, was bad news further south, where the grass gave way to open sand.

Pliocene (Pt 3): Of Gazelles and Three-toed Horses

Hipparion

The Zanclean Flood may have been a catastrophe of epic proportions, but, so long as you were above where the flood waters eventually stopped, Europe at the dawn of the Pliocene was a fairly pleasant place. The weather was warmer than today, and, apparently wetter too, which might not be what time-travelling tourists would be looking for, but was certainly good news for the plants that were actually there. Where places like Spain, Italy, and Greece are today dominated by... well... "Mediterranean" scrubland, back then they would have been considerably greener. And what's good for plants is good for herbivores.

Especially when it comes to cloven-hoofed animals, many of these would have been animals that would have been, at least in general terms, familiar to us. Not necessarily familiar to us from Europe, though, since, in addition to pigs, bovines, and deer, there were also a number of antelopes. These were mostly members of the gazelle subfamily, although there were others, including some, for example, related to the modern sable antelope. The gazelles included Hispanodorcas, a small and slender antelope with slightly twisting horns, with fossils found in southern Spain. However, some were even closer to the gazelles of today, to the point that, if, like most people, you'd be pressed to tell the difference between a Dorcas gazelle and a Speke's gazelle today (or at least, to know which one was which), you'd probably not have identified these as anything different, either - although at least some of them were smaller than any living species, which might have helped.