A study of the diversity of animal body plans finds that the development of life until the Cambrian period included a wide range of designs and that the aggregates of forms seen in modern species are remnants of the initial range, with now-extinct branches of the animal kingdom representing the original diversity; the study suggests that animal biodiversity has expanded episodically to the present day, in contrast to theories of a Cambrian explosion, and an increasing repertoire of regulatory genes correlated with increasing diversity in forms.
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Article #18-10575: "Evolution of metazoan morphological disparity," by Bradley Deline et al.
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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences