Recent progress in paleontological methods for dating the Tree of Life
@article{Laurin2012RecentPI, title={Recent progress in paleontological methods for dating the Tree of Life}, author={Michel Laurin}, journal={Frontiers in Genetics}, year={2012}, volume={3} }
Dating the Tree of Life (TOL) has become a major goal of biological research. Beyond the intrinsic interest of reconstructing the history of taxonomic diversification, time-calibrated trees (timetrees for short, as used throughout below) are required in many types of comparative analyses, where branch lengths are used to assess the conservation importance of lineages, correlation between characters, or to assess phylogenetic niche conservatism, among other uses. Improvements in dating the TOL…
26 Citations
Phylogeny and Palaeobiodiversity
- Environmental Science
- 2013
The development of the phylogenetic diversity index now allows, at least in theory, a close integration of of phylogeny and paleobiodiversity, but in practice, this unification is only incipient. It…
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- Environmental Science, GeographybioRxiv
- 2019
Predictive models are developed that demonstrate that the possession of distinctive character state combinations is the primary predictor of the degree of induced topological change, and that the relative impact of taxa (fossil and extant) can be predicted to some extent before any analysis.
Death is on Our Side: Paleontological Data Drastically Modify Phylogenetic Hypotheses.
- Environmental Science, BiologySystematic biology
- 2020
Predictive models are developed that demonstrate that the possession of distinctive character state combinations is the primary predictor of the degree of induced topological change, and that the relative impact of taxa can be predicted to some extent before any phylogenetic analysis.
Combining fossil and molecular data to date the diversification of New World Primates
- Geography, Environmental ScienceJournal of evolutionary biology
- 2013
The results corroborate the hypothesis that living platyrrhines diversified in the last 20 Ma and that Miocene Patagonian fossils compose an independent evolutionary radiation that diversify in the late Oligocene and show that morphological data can be analysed using the same methodological framework applied in relaxed molecular clock studies.
A revised dated phylogeny of the arachnid order Opiliones
- Environmental ScienceFront. Genet.
- 2014
These analyses support basal diversification of Opiliones in the Ordovician-Devonian period, corroborating the inferred ancient origins of this arthropod order, and underscore the importance of diversity discovery—both paleontological and neontological—in evolutionary inference.
An updated paleontological timetree of lissamphibians, with comments on the anatomy of Jurassic crown-group salamanders (Urodela)
- Environmental Science
- 2014
The conclusion that the fossil record of Lissamphibia is dense enough to provide reliable calibration constraints for molecular divergence dating is upheld and some of the divergence dates the authors infer from the tree are up to 15 Ma younger than previously published.
Extinction in Phylogenetics and Biogeography: From Timetrees to Patterns of Biotic Assemblage
- Environmental Science, GeographyFront. Genet.
- 2016
This work focuses on the problem of discriminating between alternative high extinction scenarios using time trees with only extant taxa, and on the confounding effect introduced by asymmetric spatial extinction – different rates of extinction across areas – in biogeographic inference.
Distributions of extinction times from fossil ages and tree topologies: the example of mid-Permian synapsid extinctions
- Environmental Science, GeographyPeerJ
- 2021
The timing of extinctions of these three Permo-Carboniferous synapsid taxa and of their component lineages supports the idea that the biological crisis in the late Kungurian/early Roadian consisted of a progressive decline in biodiversity throughout the Kungurians.
Distributions of extinction times from fossil ages and tree topologies: the example of some mid-Permian synapsid extinctions
- Environmental Science, GeographybioRxiv
- 2021
Given a phylogenetic tree that includes only extinct, or a mix of extinct and extant taxa, where at least some fossil data are available, we present a method to compute the distribution of the…
Late Glacial Demographic Expansion Motivates a Clock Overhaul for Population Genetics.
- BiologySystematic biology
- 2016
The calibration of demographic transition (CDT) method is proposed, which uses the timing of climatic changes over the late glacial warming period to calibrate expansions in various species and provides a robust and broadly applicable clock for population genetics.
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