Hello VeritasKarishma egmat
I eliminated D and E because of 'to'. Because it changes the meaning of the sentence that embryologists found evidence with intention to prove that elephant is descended from aquatic animal when clearly that is not the intended meaning, am I doing something wrong?

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In option (A), the OG says: "the phrase following the conjunction "and" is not parallel with the relative clause "that the elephant is descended..."

This is confusing because the phrases have been separated by ", and" and the following phrase should be an independent one. Why does it still have to follow parallelism?

Hi Pranjal07,

That structure (comma + and) doesn't always introduce an independent clause. What the OG is trying to say is that there is no subject-verb combination on the right of the and.

1. ... and its trunk originally evolving...

Its trunk is capable of acting as a subject, but evolving is just a present participle (an -ing is never a complete verb on its own). This means that we don't have a subject-verb combination on the right to match the one on the left of the and.

Hi Ajitesh,
You explained it very well. Thanks a lot for replying.
However, I read somewhere that whenever ",and" is introduced in the sentence, if the following part is an independent clause, it doesn't have to follow parallelism.
Is this okay?

Hi Payal/Egmat Team,

I am student of your course and had a related query,
To + verb signifies intent, which would signify that the Australian Embryologists have found evidence with an intention to suggest the elephant...
I am not sure the above makes sense with to given the rules

Can you please help me understand if I am using the to + verb signifying intent wrongly, in which case how should one look at it the right way to avoid mistakes in the future.

Hey Mainhoon,

Well, "evidence to suggest" is a better choice than "evidence that suggests," but I'd say the comma is the major issue.

As for Munda's question, no it wouldn't be quite as correct to say "the elephant has descended," this implies the action of descending, as in "The elephant has descended the stairs." But this meaning of "descended" is different. To "be descended" from something is a constant (like being "green" or "American"), and thus ought to be in the present tense, as in "Men are descended from apes." You wouldn't say "men have descended from apes," because it isn't a tense action, but a state of being.

Hope that makes sense!

-t

Hi,

Doesnt ' evidence to suggest' mean that embryologists found the evidence for the purpose to suggest instead of the intended meaning that the evidence suggests something.