Outside the Francevillian lagoon, oceans still lacked phosphorus and carried little oxygen. Larger creatures would have struggled in those harsh surroundings.

These bubbles likely popped up and fizzled out a couple of times before overall conditions spread. Once they did it would have almost been like Star Wars, previously isolated “planets” with their own evolutionary past and possibly drastically different lengths of evolution before mixing.

Squids might be so weird because they were from a different pocket than everything else, it would explain why their DNA is so “alien”.