GMAT Sentence Correction (SC) | Re: The part wildlife of america had played

Hi all,
in my 2 cents,

No need for past perfect tense;hence option A and E are gone.
It is "the part" that defeats the imagination.Option B is eliminated for noun-pronoun mismatch.
Option C is wrong as there is no proper connector for two clauses.

I could boil down to option D but not sure with the usage of "present tense" : "defeats".
Is it because it is generally accepted that such effect goes beyond imagination regardless of time?

Please share your thoughts
Thanks
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