The fossilized birth-death process for coherent calibration of divergence-time estimates.

ABSTRACT: Time-calibrated species phylogenies are critical for addressing a wide range of questions in evolutionary biology, such as those that elucidate historical biogeography or uncover patterns of coevolution and diversification. Because molecular sequence data are not informative on absolute time, external data--most commonly, fossil age estimates--are required to calibrate estimates of species divergence dates. For Bayesian divergence time methods, the common practice for calibration using fossil information involves placing arbitrarily chosen parametric distributions on internal nodes, often disregarding most of the information in the fossil record. We introduce the "fossilized birth-death" (FBD) process--a model for calibrating divergence time estimates in a Bayesian framework, explicitly ac

SUBMITTER: Heath TA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4115571 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature