Nor did any scientist ever say such a thing, and that is your basic problem: you don't know, or won't confess, the truth about scientific theory of evolution.
Fossils show the earliest actual mammals around 160 million years ago, small, insect eating tree climbing.
They were certainly not squirrels, but did perhaps fill some of the same ecological niches squirrel-like creatures fill today.
Fossils show the first identifiable ancestors of horses & rhinoceroses -- they were fox to sheep-sized creatures -- around 60 million years ago, relatively soon after dinosaurs' extinction.
The first clearly horse-like fossils -- dog sized -- appeared around 50 million years.
From that point on, each later fossil appears more and more like today's horses.
As for Sequoia trees, they are not even in the same order as Maple trees, arguably not even in the same phylum, meaning in no possible way did maples turn into sequoias.
Their common ancestors, which were far from either Sequoias or Maples, lived hundreds of millions of years ago.
DoughtyOne: "I don’t buy into evolution as the origin of the human species."
Fossil evidence for distinctly pre-human and human-like creatures goes back millions of years, and some more recent bones have been analyzed for DNA, showing they were very closely related to us -- close enough to be classified in the same species, and to have interbred.
As for God's role in our creation, Genesis tells us that He formed man from the "dust of the ground" and "breathed the breath of life" into us.
Seems to me, that is also what evolution theory tells us.
DoughtyOne: "I don’t buy into the idea that every animal came from some space spill on isle 6 or a lightening bolt in a pond."
I have no idea what that's supposed to mean, but so far as I know, no evidence has ever been found that all life on Earth is not somehow related, meaning descended from common ancestors.
What's certainly true is that we have, as yet, no confirmed theory on how life first arose on Earth -- whether home-grown, or imported from some other star-system, we don't know. Yet.
Therefore: at this point, almost any hypothesis is still a possibility.
DoughtyOne: "Science does not prove that was the case.
That’s the end of the story for me."
Literally, science does not "prove" any hypothesis, theory, or even observation.
The best science can hope to do is confirm by repeated experiments that a theory is not false.
So, do you begin to comprehend that science is not all-about "certainty"?
So we don't "believe" a scientific theory, we merely accept it as having been confirmed, pending some better confirmed explanation.
That's the way science works.
Nor does science require anybody to accept any of its hypotheses & theories.
The only real restriction is: you must not call your own religious ideas "science", because they are not.