ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
The evolution of methods for establishing evolutionary timescales.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed.
- On the origin of animals and placental mammals: a critique of literalist readings of the fossil record.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Genome-Wide Analysis ofInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2026Article
- Integrated analysis of fossils and molecular divergence time estimates a latest Jurassic origin of angiosperms.Nature plants · 2026Article
- Practical Guide and Review of Fossil Tip-Dating in Phylogenetics.Systematic biology · 2026Review
- A timetree of Fungi dated with fossils and horizontal gene transfers.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Uncertainty in the timing of diversification of flowering plants rests with equivocal interpretation of their fossil record.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- New insights on angiosperm crown age based on Bayesian node dating and skyline fossilized birth-death approaches.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Low oxygen but dynamic marine redox conditions permitted the Cambrian Radiation.Science advances · 2025Article
- Modeling Substitution Rate Evolution across Lineages and Relaxing the Molecular Clock.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Review
- The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Identification of the mode of evolution in incomplete carbonate successions.BMC ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Freshwater fish and the Cretaceous/Palaeogene boundary: a critical assessment of survivorship patterns.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Molecular Dating of the Teleost Whole Genome Duplication (3R) Is Compatible With the Expectations of Delayed Rediploidization.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Bayesian Total-Evidence Dating Revisits Sloth Phylogeny and Biogeography: A Cautionary Tale on Morphological Clock Analyses.Systematic biology · 2024Article
- Geologically calibrated mammalian tree and its correlation with global events, including the emergence of humans.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Impacts of Taxon-Sampling Schemes on Bayesian Tip Dating Under the Fossilized Birth-Death Process.Systematic biology · 2023Article
- A timescale for placental mammal diversification based on Bayesian modeling of the fossil record.Current biology : CB · 2023Article
- Rapidly changing speciation and extinction rates can be inferred in spite of nonidentifiability.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Divergent evolutionary trajectories of bryophytes and tracheophytes from a complex common ancestor of land plants.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Review
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2 authors.
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Abstract
The fossil record is well known to be incomplete. Read literally, it provides a distorted view of the history of species divergence and extinction, because different species have different propensities to fossilize, the amount of rock fluctuates over geological timescales, as does the nature of the environments that it preserves. Even so, patterns in the fossil evidence allow us to assess the incompleteness of the fossil record. While the molecular clock can be used to extend the time estimates from fossil species to lineages not represented in the fossil record, fossils are the only source of information concerning absolute (geological) times in molecular dating analysis. We review different ways of incorporating fossil evidence in modern clock dating analyses, including node-calibrations where lineage divergence times are constrained using probability densities and tip-calibrations where fossil species at the tips of the tree are assigned dates from dated rock strata. While node-calibrations are often constructed by a crude assessment of the fossil evidence and thus involves arbitrariness, tip-calibrations may be too sensitive to the prior on divergence times or the branching process and influenced unduly affected by well-known problems of morphological character evolution, such as environmental influence on morphological phenotypes, correlation among traits, and convergent evolution in disparate species. We discuss the utility of time information from fossils in phylogeny estimation and the search for ancestors in the fossil record.This article is part of the themed issue 'Dating species divergences using rocks and clocks'.
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