Hyraxes are any species of fairly small, thickset, herbivorous mammals in the order Hyracoidea. They retain a number of early mammalian characteristics; in particular, they have poorly developed internal temperature regulation (which they deal with by huddling together for warmth, and by basking in the sun like reptiles).

The words “rabbit”, “hare”, or “coney” appear as terms for the hyrax in some English translations of the Bible. Early English translators had no knowledge of the hyrax (Hebrew shaphan), and therefore no name for them.

For many millions of years, hyraxes were the primary terrestrial herbivore in Africa, just as odd-toed ungulates were in the Americas. Through the middle to late Eocene, there were many different species, the largest of them about the weight of a small horse, the smallest the size of a mouse. During the Miocene, however, competition from the newly developed bovids—very efficient grazers and browsers—pushed the hyraxes out of the prime territory and into marginal niches. Nevertheless, the order remained widespread, diverse and successful as late as the end of the Pliocene (about two million years ago) with representatives throughout most of Africa, Europe and Asia.

The descendants of the giant hyracoids evolved in different ways. Some became smaller, and gave rise to the modern hyrax family. Others appear to have taken to the water (perhaps like the modern capybara), and ultimately gave rise to the elephant family, and perhaps also the sirenians (dugongs and manatees). DNA evidence supports this hypothesis, and the small modern hyraxes share numerous features with elephants, such as toenails, excellent hearing, sensitive pads on their feet, small tusks, good memory, high brain functions compared to other similar mammals, and the shape of some of their bones.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Convergent evolution occurs when two unrelated groups of animals develop similar structures independent of each other. One example is the wings of bats and those of birds. But the similarities between the eyes of mammals and cephalopods are so close it would be like if bats had independently developed feathers and hollow bones. You may wonder how we know the octopus and mammalian eye is truly convergent evolution and not just common traits inherited from common ancestors. This is because the vertebrate/invertebrate lines diverged around 500 million years ago, before either branch had eyes at all.

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Nylon-eating bacteria are a strain of Flavobacterium that is capable of digesting certain byproducts of nylon 6 manufacture. In 1975 a team of Japanese scientists discovered a strain of Flavobacterium, living in ponds containing waste water from a nylon factory, that was capable of digesting certain byproducts of nylon 6 manufacture, such as the linear dimer of 6-aminohexanoate, even though those substances are not known to have existed before the invention of nylon in 1935. Further study revealed that the three enzymes the bacteria were using to digest the byproducts were significantly different from any other enzymes produced by other Flavobacterium strains (or any other bacteria for that matter), and not effective on any material other than the manmade nylon byproducts.

Hyacotherium, the Dawn Horse (extinct)

Mosasaurs (from Latin Mosa meaning the ‘Meuse river’, and Greek sauros meaning ‘lizard’) are large extinct marine lizards.[…]Mosasaurs are now considered to be the closest relatives of snakes, due to cladistic analyses that have taken into account similarities in jaw and skull anatomies.Larger mosasaurs were more typical: mosasaurs ranged in size up to 17 metres (56 ft). Tylosaurus holds the record for longest mosasaur, at 17.5 metres (57 ft).