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Ramón tells Jane, "You need sex education in this country, too many kids are born out of wedlock."
This was 65 million years ago, the beginning of the age of mammals. Mammals survived on both North and South America, but separated, they evolved in very different ways. In South America, the fauna included two-story sloths and massive, angry-looking beasts with teeth and tusks coming out of everywhere.
North America continued to connect off and on with Asia, and so Asia's creatures flooded North America: camels, deer, large cats, dogs and bears.
Plates shifted again, and the Isthmus arose from the ocean, temporarily connecting the two continents. Animals and plants from both poured in. But as it goes, Central America would slip under the ocean again and again, each time leaving only its mountaintops above.
Even before the connection between continents was fastened, each was already beginning to seed each other: South American birds began to head north, seeking new feeding grounds. Bats and seeds in the wind went south.
But each time Central America sank, its life was forced to creep up the slowly sinking mountains. These mountains; these great volcanoes, they each became arks of life, hosting new immigrants from two formerly unfamiliar continents.
It is a rule of geography that when a larger continent bashes into a smaller continent, the life of the larger continent overtakes that of its smaller neighbor. For reasons still unknown to science, when Panama and Costa Rica and Nicaragua attached themselves to Honduras and Guatemala and the floodgates opened, this never happened. If anything, Central America's South American immigrants prospered in the new land most.
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