SC:Australian embryologists have found evidence

[CHUNX638]

[text removed by editor]

I have trouble in choice D.
I notice that there are a parallelism markers "and", but I cannot figure out the parallel elements.
What's the problem in the parallelism?
evolved is a verb or a past participle modifiers?

Thank you very much!

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

Please read the forum guidelines before posting. This looks like SC 894 from the Official Guide 2020, which is a copyright resource, so unfortunately we can't post material from it here.

The correct answer for this problem is E, so expect some problem with D. Here's how I'd analyze the parallelism: the marker word is 'and', the root phrase is '...to suggest that', and the parallel elements are first 'the elephant has descended from an aquatic animal' and second 'its trunk originally evolved'. The parallel structure here is showing 2 things that the evidence suggests. First, something about the elephant and, second, something about its trunk. There are 2 verbs 'has descended' and 'evolved'. It's not wrong that these verbs are different tenses - parallel structures can often have elements with different verb tenses without a problem, such as this (correct) example 'I live in London, but used to live in York.' - but the problem here is with 'has descended'. If you're not sure what this means or how we use this phrase, then look it up in a good dictionary (such as https://www.lexico.com/). In short, we can't say 'has descended' to mean 'evolved from', we should say 'is descended'.

I believe that the GMAT Navigator on the Atlas Center (under 'Official Guide resources') has an explanation for this problem.