ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution2016
Dating placentalia: Morphological clocks fail to close the molecular fossil gap.
Article in Evolution; international journal of organic evolution, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Evolutionary Models for the Diversification of Placental Mammals Across the KPg Boundary.Frontiers in genetics · 2019Pooled it
- The evolutionary history and timeline of mites in ancient soils.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Improved mammalian family phylogeny using gap-rare multiple sequence alignment: A timetree of extant placentals and marsupials.Zoological research · 2023Article
- Revisiting proboscidean phylogeny and evolution through total evidence and palaeogenetic analyses includingiScience · 2022Article
- Molecular and morphological clocks for estimating evolutionary divergence times.BMC ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Inferring the mammal tree: Species-level sets of phylogenies for questions in ecology, evolution, and conservation.PLoS biology · 2019Article
- Data partitioning and correction for ascertainment bias reduce the uncertainty of placental mammal divergence times inferred from the morphological clock.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Active Transport of Peptides Across the Intact Human Tympanic Membrane.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Pre- versus post-mass extinction divergence of Mesozoic marine reptiles dictated by time-scale dependence of evolutionary rates.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Empirical and Bayesian approaches to fossil-only divergence times: A study across three reptile clades.PloS one · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Dating the origin of Placentalia has been a contentious issue for biologists and paleontologists. Although it is likely that crown-group placentals originated in the Late Cretaceous, nearly all molecular clock estimates point to a deeper Cretaceous origin. An approach with the potential to reconcile this discrepancy could be the application of a morphological clock. This would permit the direct incorporation of fossil data in node dating, and would break long internal branches of the tree, so leading to improved estimates of node ages. Here, we use a large morphological dataset and the tip-calibration approach of MrBayes. We find that the estimated date for the origin of crown mammals is much older, ∼130-145 million years ago (Ma), than fossil and molecular clock data (∼80-90 Ma). Our results suggest that tip calibration may result in estimated dates that are more ancient than those obtained from other sources of data. This can be partially overcome by constraining the ages of internal nodes on the tree; however, when this was applied to our dataset, the estimated dates were still substantially more ancient than expected. We recommend that results obtained using tip calibration, and possibly morphological dating more generally, should be treated with caution.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.