CHICAGO, IL.- A powerful thoroughbred, its mane flying, crosses the finish line in triumph at the Kentucky Derby. A young rodeo rider grabs his saddle horn and holds on tight as a bronco bucks and lurches beneath him. Heavily built draft horses strain hard to pull wagonloads of grain over a rustic landscape. Thrilling, romantic, and nostalgic images such as these often come to mind when we think of horses. But an important new exhibition at The Field Museum, The Horse, invites us to see horses as much more: the machines that helped create the modern world. “Puny but clever, enterprising humans needed an animate energy source that was both mobile and controllable—hence the domestic horse,” says exhibition curator Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History. “What no one could have foreseen was that, over the millennia, while we molded the horse to our ends, the horse also molded us by changing the scale and