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Fossil evidence indicates NO horses in America until they were introduced by the Spanish.

Not true.

http://www.acnatsci.org/museum/leidy/paleo/equus.html

says there were remains of horses on the American continent that are pre-Columbian. Is this site not credible? I searched on "Horses in ancient america" and came up with 10 + hits, not all of which are "Mormon" related. There is ample evidence that this issue is far from settled--at least beyond the closed minds of the PC crowd.

Also how can you be sure when the carvings were made?

Can anyone be sure when anything was carved? The photo I saw of the horse was taken around 1950, and it is on a stone that is an integral part of a ruined building (the Nunnery, I think), IMHO it is not a forgery, if it were forged with the intent of making people think horses were among the Mayans, when all credible PC archaeologists know there were none, the forger would have carved a more convincing "horse". Moreover, why would anyone need to create false evidence of the existence of animals that even real science admits were on this continent, even if they don't agree on the timing? The PC crowd says elephants and horses (equus) were extinct 10,000 years ago. They easily could have missed a few isolated herds that survived for a few thousand years more until they interacted with the Olmecs between 3,200 B.C. and their (the Olmecs) subsequent demise around 200 B.C.

Perhaps the reason the Mayans associated the image of an elephant with a rain god, is because the elephants were more plentiful when the climate was wetter, but became extinct during a prolonged drought. Deifying a symbol of wetter climate would be one way a culture would try to end droughts.

Science is continually discovering some species they thought died out eons ago, finding out that small herds of horses or elephants survived a couple of thousand years longer than they thought is no big deal.

The Mayan culture had apparently developed a "tradition", for lack of a better word, that eschewed the use of draft animals, even if they had them. It appears the Mayan kings preferred being transported around by servants on couches (?). They also apparently didn't use wheeled transportation despite the presence of an extensive network of wide, paved roads. This aversion to wheels for transportation is puzzling when we discover the Mayans had wheeled toys. They must have had some cultural reason for not using the wheel for transportation. I find it dificult to believe that an ancient society that had the numeric concept of zero, plotted the orbits of multiple planets, and calculated lunar and solar calendars equal in accuracy to our own calendars, was too stupid to know about the wheel.

I am not beholden to any requirement that horses and elephants be proven to have existed among the Mayans. None of my beliefs would be shaken if it could be proven that was the case. IMHO the stone depictions of Chac the Rain God look more like an elephant than do the stone depictions the PC Arcaeologists say are jaguars look like jaguars. They admit the Mayans knew what a jaguar looked like because the jaguars are still there. They don't think the Mayans knew what an elephant looked like because the elephants are not still there. (Maybe the jaguars ate all the elephants?)