An international research team has found a common ancestor for the rhino and the horse.

The research team uncovered fossils in india that point to a common ancestor for perissodactyls, which are odd-toed ungulates that include rhinos, horses, and tapirs. Scientists have long known they were part of the same family, but the fossils represent the first time they have uncovered a common ancestor, according to NBC News.

It has been a gradual process: over the last 10 years or so, researchers have dug up more than 200 bones belonging to Cambaytherium thewissi in an open-pit coal mine northeast of Mumbai in Gujarat state.

With the help of these bones, researchers were able to get a better handle on Cambaytherium, and reported in the journal Nature Communications that the creature — which resembles a modern-day tapir — closely matches early perissodactyls.

Ken Rose, a professor of functional anatomy and evolution at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said scientists have found what is “essentially the cousin of all living perissodactyls,” according to the NBC News report.

The animal lived 54.5 million years ago when India was just an island between Madagascar and Asia. Researchers don’t know how the creature got on that island, although it is possible there was a land bridge that linked it to the Horn of Africa or the Arabian Peninsula.

When the land bridge disappeared, Cambaytherium was isolated from an evolutionary standpoint, allowing it to develop one lineage that led to the perissodactyls we have today. What researchers found was probably a remnant of an ancestral group that gave rise to horses and rhinos.

The animal was about the size of a pig and weighed between 45 and 75 pounds. It also likely had five toe-like bones, which were reduced as the animal developed hooves. Cambaytherium’s features are considered an intermediate step between perissodactyla and primitive animals.

Besides the ancestry issue, the bones shed light on the idea that groups of mammals from the Eocene period could have evolved on the Indian subcontinent as it sat in the middle of the sea before colliding with Asia, an idea proposed in a paper back in 1990 at Stony Brook University.

Other animals, such as primates and rodents, were also found on India at the time. Researchers are looking into the land bridge idea to solve that particular mystery.