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Any-Broccoli-3911 t1_j5jhmr0 wrote

First, all animals evolve at a similar pace. If you got A->B->C->D, then D got extinct, A, B, C won't exist anymore, so there's no C to evolve back into D.

Second, mutations are random and the number of possibilities is extremely large, enough that we can consider it almost infinite. So the probability to have mutations that bring back the same species that got extinct before is almost 0.

What does happen is convergent evolution in which a species evolve to be morphologically similar to another species (extinct or not) because they occupy a similar ecological niche (what they eat and the environment they live in). Though they are morphologically similar, they'll still be as genetically different as expected for species that diverged when they did. They'll still have a lot of differences due to those genetic differences.

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