Horses are mentioned a total of eleven times in the Book of Mormon. However, there is no archaeological or paleontological evidence to support the presence of horses on the American continent during the time frame described in the Book of Mormon narrative (approximately 2500 BC to 400 AD).

By the time of the events claimed in the Book of Mormon, horses had been extinct in the Western Hemisphere for thousands of years. Fossil records confirm that native North American horse species (genus Equus) went extinct around 10,000 years ago—near the end of the Pleistocene epoch, approximately 8,000 BC. While these prehistoric horses once roamed the Americas, they vanished long before the rise of any known civilizations in Mesoamerica or elsewhere in the Americas.

Knowledge of this extinction was available by the early 19th century, prior to Joseph Smith Jr.’s dictation of the Book of Mormon. At that time, American and European scientists were already aware that horses had once existed prehistorically in the Americas but had become extinct and were not part of the post-Pleistocene faunal record.

Domesticated horses were not present in the Western Hemisphere again until they were reintroduced by European explorers. Christopher Columbus brought horses to the Caribbean in 1493 on his second voyage, and Hernán Cortés later introduced them to mainland North America in 1519 during the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

The mention of horses in the Book of Mormon is anachronistic. All credible evidence supports the view that horses did not exist in the Americas during the period described in that text and were only reintroduced by Europeans more than a millennium later.