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evolution

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Viral video shows how to find your vestigial organs

Your tailbone was once an anchor for … your tail.

Image from Vox on YouTube.

Evolution of the body is divergent.

The human body is an amazing organism, to say the least.

To watch an athlete dunk a basketball or a ballerina turn a pirouette is to witness an extraordinary machine at work. But the human body is also a biological junkyard of useless ideas it has yet to ditch as we evolve.

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Nómade the elephant was born without tusks. Now her mutation is mainstream.

Evolution could help defend elephants from poachers — but that might not be a good thing.

Growing up in war-torn Mozambique wasn't easy for Nómade the elephant.

Mozambique, a southeastern African nation, gained its independence from Portugal in 1975. Then two years later, the Cold War found its way onto Mozambican soil in a bloody conflict that lasted until the mid-1990s and claimed up to a million human lives and displacing even more.

When the human forces weren't directly at each other's throats, they scavenged the savannah for animals they could kill for meat and ivory to trade for weapons or cash. But Nómade survived, along with 11 of her sisters, thanks in part to a miracle mutation that left them without tusks.

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How many times has this happened to you? You're dating someone you really like. You've been out a few times. You're absolutely hitting it off. But there's that one thing you just can't quite get over.

Maybe they have bad breath? Or a messy apartment? Or a collection of tiny fiberglass unicorn figurines that's just a little ... too large?


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Today is Charles Darwin's 207th birthday! Darwin, who famously wrote "On the Origin of Species," the book that introduced much of the world to evolution and the theory of natural selection, didn't just write about animals. He also kept quite a few of them as pets, including several dogs, a tortoise (kind of), and pigeons.

Just like Darwin, Mother Nature shares her home with some interesting animal companions. And if you squint, you can see the resemblance they have to more familiar animal faces.

So in celebration of Darwin's birthday and his pets, here are 10 cool animals that don't look exactly like your domesticated Fluffys, Pollys, and Rexes but just might be related to them.

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