ArticleSystematic biology2024
Two Notorious Nodes: A Critical Examination of Relaxed Molecular Clock Age Estimates of the Bilaterian Animals and Placental Mammals.
Article in Systematic biology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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14 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
- Review
- Genomic Distortion of Jawed Vertebrate Phylogeny.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Evolutionary Tempo, Supertaxa, and Living Fossils.Systematic biology · 2025Article
- Distributed neural computation and the evolution of the first brains.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Phylogenomic timetree-calibrated speciation clocks for Caenorhabditis nematodes reveal slow but disproportionate accumulation of post-zygotic reproductive isolation.PLoS genetics · 2025Article
- Phylogenomics establishes an Early Miocene reconstruction of reef vertebrate diversity.Science advances · 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
- Ediacaran origin and Ediacaran-Cambrian diversification of Metazoa.Science advances · 2024Article
- Noise leads to the perceived increase in evolutionary rates over short time scales.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Proterozoic microfossils continue to provide new insights into the rise of complex eukaryotic life.Royal Society open science · 2024Review
- Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
The popularity of relaxed clock Bayesian inference of clade origin timings has generated several recent publications with focal results considerably older than the fossils of the clades in question. Here, we critically examine two such clades: the animals (with a focus on the bilaterians) and the mammals (with a focus on the placentals). Each example displays a set of characteristic pathologies which, although much commented on, are rarely corrected for. We conclude that in neither case does the molecular clock analysis provide any evidence for an origin of the clade deeper than what is suggested by the fossil record. In addition, both these clades have other features (including, in the case of the placental mammals, proximity to a large mass extinction) that allow us to generate precise expectations of the timings of their origins. Thus, in these instances, the fossil record can provide a powerful test of molecular clock methodology, and why it goes astray, and we have every reason to think these problems are general. [Cambrian explosion; mammalian evolution; molecular clocks.].
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