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I could be way off base here, and I don't honestly know much about biology... but just because two species don't have recent common ancestors, doesn't mean they couldn't have co-evolved and ended up very similarly, right? Wouldn't this be grounds for relating their classification?

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Convergent evolution happens all the time but taxonomy is nonetheless based on ancestry.

For a fun somewhat related topic, it was neat to see the hierarchy of strings and characters in Common Lisp the other day. Can be used to illustrate a bit of the shortcoming of using ancestry to answer if two things are related. https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/strings.html#stri...

Also "horizontal gene transfer" happens in bacteria, and even happens in multicellular sexually-reproducing organisms after viral infection in some cases. Taxonomy should be a directed acyclic graph, not a tree.

They could have a similar phenotype without being genetically similar.

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