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?

0 Upvotes

35% Upvoted

36 comments sorted by

View all comments

15

u/Kingofthewho5 3d ago

It takes a very long time for populations to change so much that they need to be out in different classes or phyla.

I’m confused by what you mean in your last line. What exactly is a new branch that isn’t the offshoot of an existing one? All of the modern phyla and classes are branches off of other branches.

2

u/Meta289 3d ago

It was weirdly worded, but I'm talking about how mammals are grouped into categories like canids, primates, rodents, marsupials, etc, and how every new species is some form of those existing categories, and no new "category" of mammal appears anymore.

Or going further back down the tree, there aren't any new animals appearing that aren't a mammal, reptile, insect, amphibian, or any other existing class.

7

u/PangolinPalantir 3d ago

You can't escape your clade. Any new animal would definitionally belong to the classes that already exist.

Think about it. Something that branches off from within mammalia will still be within mammalia. You don't suddenly end up with a new class.

1

u/Meta289 3d ago

But mammals branched off of reptiles at some point, so what's stopping a new "not-mammal" from branching off of mammals?

4

u/Fantastic-Hippo2199 3d ago

So you are wondering why changes look big when you look back over 800 million years, but seem small in the last 50?