I am reminded of the role-playing game, "Traveller". Set in a space-faring future and faced with the task of coming up with ecologies for the thousands of potential worlds that players might pass through, they settled on the answer of describing encountered animals and plants (and other) by their ecological niche-role: ambush predator, solitary chaser, pack chaser, omnivorous burrower, herbivorous runner, etc. The creatures were worlds apart and as unrelated as several lightyears of open space could make them, yet they faced similar challenges and could therefore be counted on to behave and have characteristics dictated by their similar niches - one fast and nervous, easily startled, perhaps with some form of fixed charging weapon to keep predators from trying to block its running path, another keen-sighted for the chase and possessed of some form of rending bioweaponry to both kill and consume its prey, a third nearly blind but dangerously well-equipped for digging and defending borrows. If multiple mobile species evolve on an open plain, you can pretty well count on some of them becoming very good at running away and some of them becoming very good at chasing, irrespective of what the root stock was.