ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2017
Testing the molecular clock using mechanistic models of fossil preservation and molecular evolution.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Estimating Divergence Times and Diversification Rates with the Unresolved Fossilized Birth-Death Process.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- On the origin of animals and placental mammals: a critique of literalist readings of the fossil record.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Comparative Organellar Genomics of Pellidae: Insights into Codon Usage, Nucleotide Diversity, and Structural Evolution.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The first leech body fossil predates estimated hirudinidan origins by 200 million years.PeerJ · 2025Article
- Ediacaran origin and Ediacaran-Cambrian diversification of Metazoa.Science advances · 2024Article
- The minnowEcohydrology : ecosystems, land and water process interactions, ecohydrogeomorphology · 2022Article
- Editorial: Timetrees: Incorporating fossils and molecules.Frontiers in genetics · 2022Article
- Molecular dating for phylogenies containing a mix of populations and species by using Bayesian and RelTime approaches.Molecular ecology resources · 2021Article
- Relative Efficiencies of Simple and Complex Substitution Models in Estimating Divergence Times in Phylogenomics.Molecular biology and evolution · 2020Article
- A Simulation-Based Evaluation of Tip-Dating Under the Fossilized Birth-Death Process.Systematic biology · 2020Article
- Reliable Confidence Intervals for RelTime Estimates of Evolutionary Divergence Times.Molecular biology and evolution · 2020Article
- Quantifying the Error of Secondary vs. Distant Primary Calibrations in a Simulated Environment.Frontiers in genetics · 2020Article
- Morphological stasis in the first myxomycete from the Mesozoic, and the likely role of cryptobiosis.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- The effect of alignment uncertainty, substitution models and priors in building and dating the mammal tree of life.BMC evolutionary biology · 2019Article
- Ignoring stratigraphic age uncertainty leads to erroneous estimates of species divergence times under the fossilized birth-death process.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Using the Fossil Record to Evaluate Timetree Timescales.Frontiers in genetics · 2019Review
- RelTime Relaxes the Strict Molecular Clock throughout the Phylogeny.Genome biology and evolution · 2018Article
- Constraining uncertainty in the timescale of angiosperm evolution and the veracity of a Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution.The New phytologist · 2018Article
- Testing the molecular clock using mechanistic models of fossil preservation and molecular evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Molecular sequence data provide information about relative times only, and fossil-based age constraints are the ultimate source of information about absolute times in molecular clock dating analyses. Thus, fossil calibrations are critical to molecular clock dating, but competing methods are difficult to evaluate empirically because the true evolutionary time scale is never known. Here, we combine mechanistic models of fossil preservation and sequence evolution in simulations to evaluate different approaches to constructing fossil calibrations and their impact on Bayesian molecular clock dating, and the relative impact of fossil versus molecular sampling. We show that divergence time estimation is impacted by the model of fossil preservation, sampling intensity and tree shape. The addition of sequence data may improve molecular clock estimates, but accuracy and precision is dominated by the quality of the fossil calibrations. Posterior means and medians are poor representatives of true divergence times; posterior intervals provide a much more accurate estimate of divergence times, though they may be wide and often do not have high coverage probability. Our results highlight the importance of increased fossil sampling and improved statistical approaches to generating calibrations, which should incorporate the non-uniform nature of ecological and temporal fossil species distributions.
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