Actually. . . I missed something had a smart friend point it out to me.
I’d forgotten how the positioning of the echinoderms itself was kind of interesting.
Between that, Balanglossus, Hallucigenia, and all the rest I’m wondering if the real answer is that back in the Cambrian they were ‘all kind of the same thing’, especially given that they could easily have had a much smaller amount of DNA with more in common, the morphological differences could reflect something we have less of now . . . overlapping expression of multiple common plan elements.
It’s certainly a more complex view, and one I hadn’t thought about much. And most definitely not one I can take credit for, but I have to agree that it makes some sense that whatever genetic diversity we had was lost when we got our first mitochondrial chimera, since presumably a narrower subset of organisms would have that competitive advantage, so assuming that was a singular event that radiated outward, the early Cambrian fossils very possibly didn’t share a fraction of the diversity we have. They may have had less building blocks in their cellular machinery, resulting in creatures already apparently down one morphological branch having a large shared repository of genes to express.
It does kind of complicate things if so, doesn’t it?
