Monthly Archives: April 2014
121.WHY ARE HORSES RIDDEN WITH A SADDLE?
Men have ridden horses for thousands of years. Yet, as you can probably remember from the first time you tried to ride a horse, there’s quite an art to riding.
There’s more to riding a horse than avoiding sores and aches and pains. The chief marks of good riding are ease and grace, combined with straightness of posture. When people are trained from earliest childhood, these things come naturally. The cowboys of the West usually get this kind of training, and they can ride without lifting from leather, which means they never bounce on the saddle.
120.WHO FIRST TAMED THE HORSE?
There are few animals that have played as important a role in history as the horse. This is because the horse has been so useful in warfare. Can you imagine what wandering tribes, invading armies, knights, and soldiers all over the world would have done without the horse during the last few thousand years?
We can trace the ancestors of the horse back millions of years. But who first tamed the horse, the animal that we know? It is impossible to say. We know that prehistoric man used the horse as one of his chief sources of food. This was probably long before he thought of using the horse for riding.
119.WHERE DID THE DINOSAURS LIVE?
The best way we have of knowing what creatures were alive on this earth millions of years ago is from studying fossils. Fossils are animal and plant remains buried in the rocks. These remains, which have in most cases petrified (turned to stone), may be of shells, insects, leaves, bones, whole skeletons, or simply the tracks made by ancient animals on the shores of swamps.
From such evidence, scientists believe that dinosaurs roamed the earth about 180,000,000 years ago, and that they died out about 60,000,000 years ago. What fossils have been found that make these scientists believe this?The most common ones are bones, teeth, and claws. From these, skeletons can be reconstructed so we can tell how the body was built. In other cases, there have been trails and footprints.
