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Article:
Weave of the Gods: The Real-Life Golden Fleece by: Peter Blinn Paleontologists tell us the camel family arose in the North American Great Plains about 45 million years ago. One group took the Bering land bridge into Asia to establish the populations of Bactrian camels and dromedaries, while the other chose the southern route through Panama when that land bridge rose from the sea about 3 million years ago. Several of those species prospered in South America, including the guanaco, vicuña, Lama owenii, and Lama gracilis. Ancient humans likely witnessed the extinctions of the latter two but, according to prevailing wisdom, bred the domesticated alpaca from the vicuña and the llama from the guanaco. They prized the fleeces of all four, but to them the most precious and magical was that of the vicuña. Type Microns ------------------- Vicuña 6-13 Chiru 7-9 Alpaca 10-28 Merino 12-20 Cashmere 15-19 Guanaco 16-18 Llama 20-40 Chinchilla 21 Human 15-200 As you can see from the table above, only the chiru, a gravely endangered Asian antelope which is legally off-limits, rivals the fineness of its cinnamon-colored wool. Beyond that, vicuña is exceedingly rare due to the amimal's small size (about 90 lbs, yielding only 6-8 ounces of fleece every two or three years), its obstinacy (supremely evasive and disinclined to eat or reproduce in captivity), its death-defying habitat (greatly surpassing '14
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