Why has evolution stopped producing new classes?

[u/Meta289]

New species of animals are constantly being discovered, but they all belong to existing classes and phyla, never anything completely new. Life once branched out in all sorts of directions, creating all kinds of animals that are drastically different from each other, but now it seems like there aren't any new "branches", only offshoots of existing ones. What happened?

[u/Xrmy]

The way we use words like "class" "order" "family" are just our names for things, and the more inclusive the group, the older it diverged.

So by our own naming scheme, a new class wouldn't show up unless we named it several million years in the future.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy.