Abstract. Much work has been done on the study of vertebrate gaits over the past several decades and efforts undertaken to apply this to fossil tracks, especially dinosaurs and mammals such as cats, dogs, camels, and horses. This work seeks to expand upon such studies and in particular to study footprints laid down in sand by modern horses and apply such studies to determine the gaits of fossil horse trackways. It thus builds upon the work of Renders (1984a, b) and Kienapfel et al. (2014) and suggests additional measurements that can be taken on horse footprints. In this study the footprints left in the sand by 15 horses of various breeds with various gaits were videotaped, photographed, described, and measured in order to determine characteristics useful in distinguishing gaits. These results were then applied to two new sets of fossil footprints, those of the middle Miocene merychippine horse Scaphohippus intermontanus that I personally examined and measured and those from the late Pleistocene horse Equus conversidens, previously illustrated and described in the literature (McNeil et al., 2007). The latter horse exhibits a fast gallop of around 9.4 m/s, but it is the former whose footprints are quite unique. The quantitative and visual features of these prints are suggestive of a medium-fast gait involving apparent “understepping” of diagonal couplets and hind feet that overlap the centerline. The gait that most closely matches the footprints of Scaphohippus is the “artificial” gait of a slow rack or tölt, or pace, around 1.9 m/s, though an atypical trot of a horse with major conformation issues or which is weaving (swaying) from side to side is a less likely possibility. This intimates, along with the earlier study of Renders (1984a, b), who found the artificial gait of the running walk displayed by Pliocene hipparionine horses, that ancient horses possessed a much greater variety of gaits than modern horses and that over time they lost these abilities with the exception of certain gaited breeds.

Besides “natural” gaits of walk, trot, and canter, selected horse breeds engage in the so-called artificial gaits, including the fox trot, running walk, and rack. Though some studies have been undertaken of these artificial gaits, the datasets are incomplete, sample sizes are small, and no comprehensive overview has been written. After reviewing the literature and detailing what is known about these artificial horse gaits, the authors present data of their own. Linear, temporal, and footprint parameters or given regarding artificial gaits of twenty horses total from specialized breeds. In addition to finding decreasing stride duration, lateral advanced placement, and tripedal support as one moves from the walk to the running walk to the rack, as with previous studies, we also found decreasing ipsilateral/diagonal step time ratios and increasing ipsilateral swing phase overlaps. Visually, the walk, trot, fox trot, and slow rack leave trackways of ipsilateral pairs in parallel rows, the running walk and canter leave trackways of isolated prints with the running walk pattern more symmetrical, and the fast rack, stepping pace, and pace leave trackways with an undulating pattern formed by diagonal pairs of hooves with hooves often crossing over the center line yielding a negative interior straddle.

The traditional story of the evolution of the horse (family Equidae) has been in large part about the evolution of their feet. How did modern horses come to have a single toe (digit III), with the hoof bearing a characteristic V-shaped keratinous frog on the sole, and what happened to the other digits? While it has long been known that the proximal portions of digits II and IV are retained as the splint bones, a recent hypothesis suggested that the distal portion of these digits have also been retained as part of the frog, drawing upon the famous Laetoli footprints of the tridactyl (three-toed) equid Hipparion as part of the evidence. We show here that, while there is good anatomical and embryological evidence for the proximal portions of all the accessory digits (i.e. I and V, as well as II and IV) being retained in the feet of modern horses, evidence is lacking for the retention of any distal portions of these digits. There is also good ichnological evidence that many tridactyl equids possessed a frog, and that the frog has been part of the equid foot for much of equid evolutionary history.

Aquinas argued that one may never intentionally tell an outright falsehood, that is to say, lie, even if one is doing so to help save another person’s life. Yet his position here is very different from how he treats the nature of other moral norms such as stealing, promise-keeping, and murder. For the latter Aquinas defends exceptionless moral norms, but by carefully defining what constitutes stealing, promise-keeping, and murder, allows a limited number of disassociating circumstances wherein morally relevant situations (such as a grave necessity or the presence of an unjust aggressor) take actions out of the categories of stealing or murder strictly speaking. Aquinas furthermore allows divine disassociations from the moral law in cases of murder, stealing, and even adultery, which remove certain acts from being included in prohibited categories because of divine decree, but he does not do so for lying. As a consequence, Aquinas has to resort to various elaborations as to how what seems to be a telling of a falsehood by an Old Testament figure is not really so. I will argue here that there are reasons to think Aquinas was inconsistent in his approach, and that given his philosophical presuppositions he could have and indeed should have held that it is licit to intentionally tell a falsehood to an unjust aggressor, and that this would have rendered his thought more coherent as a whole.

Contemporary scholarship on early Christian martyrdom has tended to accept the position of G. E. M. de Ste. Croix that voluntary martyrdom, or handing oneself over to the authorities prior to being sought out or arrested, was quite common. This view falls apart, however, if we avoid an overly broad definition of voluntary martyrdom, a problem common to Ste. Croix and contemporaries such as Arthur Droge, Paul Middleton, and Candida Moss, who count various political protestors, public edifiers, and comforters and aiders as voluntary martyrs. In fact, if we carefully examine the accounts of martyrdom that took place in the first four centuries, voluntary martyrdom, though not unknown, makes up a small percentage of the whole, around 12 per cent instead of the 50 per cent described by Ste. Croix and others.