Fossil biogeography: a new model to infer dispersal, extinction and sampling from palaeontological data.

ABSTRACT: Methods in historical biogeography have revolutionized our ability to infer the evolution of ancestral geographical ranges from phylogenies of extant taxa, the rates of dispersals, and biotic connectivity among areas. However, extant taxa are likely to provide limited and potentially biased information about past biogeographic processes, due to extinction, asymmetrical dispersals and variable connectivity among areas. Fossil data hold considerable information about past distribution of lineages, but suffer from largely incomplete sampling. Here we present a new dispersal-extinction-sampling (DES) model, which estimates biogeographic parameters using fossil occurrences instead of phylogenetic trees. The model estimates dispersal and extinction rates while explicitly accounting for the incom

SUBMITTER: Silvestro D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4810818 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature