阅读理解
The Tibetan Plateau(青藏高原) is the world's highest place. It's four times the size of France and home to most of the world's highest mountains. As you might expect, it's cold there. And it may be that the deep chill of the Tibetan Plateau played a role in the evolution of some of the world's most charismatic(魅力十足的) animals. That's the belief of a scientist who discovered the skull of a woolly rhino(长毛犀) on the Tibetan Plateau. The woolly rhino — two tons, two tusks, lots of hair and lots of attitude — was an Ice Age giant. It lived with other Ice Age beasts in Europe and Asia, starting about 2.5 million years ago. But Xiaoming Wang, from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, was shocked when he found a 3.5-million-year-old rhino skull(头骨化石) on the Tibetan Plateau. "It caught us by complete surprise that they are actually up in the high plateau well before the Ice Age has started," Wang says. That's about a million years before the Ice Age started, in fact. Wang thinks his discovery shows that at least some animals were prepared for the Ice Age. "At least in the case of the woolly rhino, it actually adapted itself in the cold environment in the Tibetan Plateau before the Ice Age has even started," Wang says.
"The animal actually used its head to sweep snow," Wang explains, "so they can get at the vegetation below the snow cover."
So Wang thinks the Plateau was a sort of evolutionary cradle(摇篮) for cold-weather animals. When the rest of the world eventually iced up, they moved out of Tibet and took over. Anthony Barnosky, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley, says even now, these isolated "cradles" are important for evolution(进化). "The interesting thing," Barnosky says, "is on Earth today we have biodiversity(生物多样性) isolated in certain spots, and we just never know which of those isolated places will be the cradle of evolution for the next big environmental change coming down the pike(出现)." The only problem is that to be ready, you have to know what the next environment will be like. Or just be very lucky.
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