[msrenee]

I suppose if I want to complain about the wiki article being badly written, I should probably think about working on it myself. It's pretty misleading.

As far as these being distantly related species, they are, but they're also as closely related as you can get without being in Acipenser. They're separate families, but those are the only two families within the suborder Acipenseroidei. Super neat fishes. I highly recommend looking up videos of baby paddlefish, as they're adorable. My favorite is when they're just old enough that they start switching to filter feeding. Handling sturgeon just makes you feel like you've got something ancient in your hands, which you kind of do.

What's interesting to me is that the paddlefish shares the Missouri River with both the shovelnose sturgeon and the pallid sturgeon. Also possibly the lake sturgeon if I'm remembering correctly that they sometimes come down the Missouri a bit especially during flood years. Makes me wonder if it's just luck that those sturgeon species aren't tetraploid or if tetraploid individuals are produced and selected against as they hybridize with paddlefish for potentially less well-adapted progeny.