South America
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South America is the place where all the South Americans live. It's also home to llamas, which are like goats, only with longer necks and a tendency to spit on things. South Americans eat notably large quantities of meat (especially in Brazil and Argentina).
From an evolutionary standpoint, the continent might have once (before humans showed up and cleaned it out) had a biosphere even more unusual and peculiar than Australia's, including enormous rodents (like capybaras on steroids), ground sloths, and marsupials found nowhere else in the world. Trees like the avocado and the Brazil nut are believed to be remnants of the pre-human ecosystem that supported these large extinct animals, of which the aforementioned capybaras and llamas (and similar camelids such as alpacas and vicuñas) are among the few survivors; however, there's still plenty of strange and unusual things left in the Amazon River basin, even including some of the very few groups of people never contacted by outside civilization. Some commercially important plants, including tomatoes, cacao, coca, some chile peppers, and numerous exotic hardwoods sought by the furniture industry, originate in South America as well.
In addition to the vast biodiversity of the Amazon basin, South America is also home to the tepuis of Venezuela, immense mesas containing diverse and unusual pocket ecosystems, along with some of the tallest waterfalls in the world. In the 19th century, the tepuis were thought to hold many ancient species such as unknown dinosaurs and became the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World; however, although few such throwbacks actually exist, the tepui ecosystems are still very, very interesting for a determined researcher.
Exports[edit]
Due to its geographical isolation, South America is one of the very few areas where a wine industry has grown up untouched by the phylloxera plant louse that nearly wiped out the European wine industry in the 19th century; as a result Chile and Argentina have become home to orphaned and obsolete grape varieties such as Carmenère and Malbec and have used these varieties to distinguish themselves from the other wine-producing countries of the world.
South America's other two most famous exports, oil and drugs, are the basis for the North American economy, at least partially. Argentina is also a major exporter of prime aged beef products and a major importer of prime aged Nazis, though not as many as some people think.
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