A member of the animal group including vertebrates, tunicates and cephalochordates, with a notochord as part of the characteristic developmental body plan.
A cephalochordate lineage used in comparative analysis of chordate genomes. Modern amphioxus is a living relative, not the actual ancestor of vertebrates.
A member of the lancelet lineage. Its anatomy is informative for comparisons, but a living lancelet is not an unchanged ancestor of vertebrates.
A member of the chordate lineage that molecular evidence places closer to vertebrates than are living cephalochordates.[ref]
A larvacean tunicate with dispersed Hox genes whose expression still shows aspects of anteroposterior ordering. The derived dispersed state is a counterexample to obligatory linkage for all spatial Hox regulation.
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You read the name and think: hmm, neural cords!
But then you see that his is one of its members:
Yup. That's your cousin. And it's a much closer cousin than something like arthropods, which at least have heads eyes and legs like you.
Convergent evolution is crazy!