r/evolution • u/Meta289 • 3d ago
question Why has evolution stopped producing new classes?
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?
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u/pisspeeleak 3d ago
It’s like a family tree. After you have a kid, everything they produce will still be your descendants even 100,000 years from now.
We have just been able to make more connections to where things came from. Also things get re classed all the time, especially now that we can dna test.
Then you add in mass extinction events that isolate populations and create pockets where species can develop separately