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Establishing a time-scale for plant evolution.
TLDR
A post-Jurassic origin of angiosperms and a post-Cambrian origin of land plants are rejected, and it is suggested that the establishment of the major embryophyte lineages occurred at a much slower tempo than suggested in most previous studies.
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A Divergence Dating Analysis of Turtles Using Fossil Calibrations: An Example of Best Practices
TLDR
This work provides the first explicitly justified minimum and soft maximum age constraints on 22 clades of turtles following best practice protocols and generates novel age-of-origination estimates for clades within crown Testudines.
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Exploring uncertainty in the calibration of the molecular clock
TLDR
It is demonstrated that the parameters distinguishing calibration densities have a major impact upon the prior and posterior of the divergence times, and it is critically important that users evaluate the joint prior distribution of divergence times used by their dating programmes.
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The fossilized birth-death model for the analysis of stratigraphic range data under different speciation modes
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The Fossil Calibration Database-A New Resource for Divergence Dating.
TLDR
The Fossil Calibration Database is announced, a new open-access resource providing vetted fossil calibrations to the scientific community, which follow best practices for phylogenetic justification and geochronological constraint.
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Calibration uncertainty in molecular dating analyses: there is no substitute for the prior evaluation of time priors
TLDR
The results demonstrate that a posteriori approaches can lead to the selection of erroneous calibrations in divergence time analyses and suggest the most effective means of establishing the quality of fossil-based calibrations is through a priori evaluation of the intrinsic palaeontological, stratigraphic, geochronological and phylogenetic data.
View on Royal Society
Testing the molecular clock using mechanistic models of fossil preservation and molecular evolution
TLDR
It is shown that divergence time estimation is impacted by the model of fossil preservation, sampling intensity and tree shape, and posterior intervals provide a much more accurate estimate of divergence times, though they may be wide and often do not have high coverage probability.
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Closing the gap between palaeontological and neontological speciation and extinction rate estimates
TLDR
It is demonstrated not only that this model explains much of the apparent incongruence between fossils and phylogenies, but that differences in rate estimates are actually informative about the prevalence of different speciation modes.
View on Springer
Bayesian species delimitation in Pleophylla chafers (Coleoptera) – the importance of prior choice and morphology
TLDR
This study investigates the South African scarab beetle genus Pleophylla and demonstrates that continuous morphological trait data can be extremely valuable in assessing competing hypotheses to species delimitation, and shows that the inclusion of morphological data in an integrative Bayesian framework can improve the resolution of inferred species units.
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Ignoring stratigraphic age uncertainty leads to erroneous estimates of species divergence times under the fossilized birth–death process
TLDR
A comparison of alternative approaches for handling fossil age uncertainty in analysis using the FBD process finds that fixing fossil ages to the midpoint or a random point drawn from within the stratigraphic age range leads to biases in divergence time estimates, while sampling fossil ages leads to estimates that are similar to inferences that employ the correct ages of fossils.
View on Royal Society
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