Telling the Evolutionary Time: Molecular Clocks and the Fossil Record

Confidence intervals Divergence times of lineages cannot be dated precisely (Figures 3.3, 3.5). Confidence intervals are an esse ...

when investigating Cambrian divergences. Incorporation of this variance into the confidence intervals greatly widens them but al ...

error of the estimate. Likelihood-based estimation methods that incorporate this error have been developed (Rambaut and Bromham ...

Nowadays the tests are applied to molecular data as demonstrated by Takezaki et al. (1995). Multiple nested relative rate tests ...

Nucleotide models The Jukes-Cantor (JC69) model was the first nucleotide substitution model proposed and is perhaps the simplest ...

Maximum likelihood Using these nucleotide, amino acid or codon substitution models, genetic distances can be estimated and ‘corr ...

can also be used to model rate heterogeneity across sites (Felsenstein and Churchill 1996). These allow rate correlations to be ...

Markov Chain Monte Carlo Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have made Bayesian methods computationally feasible (see Thorne ...

Divergence times were estimated in RHINO for both tree topologies and all datasets. RHINO is a modified version of QDATE (Rambau ...

Methodology appropriate for test cases From the previous discussions it is apparent that there are still many problems in estima ...

References Adachi, J. and Hasegawa, M. (1995) ‘lmproved dating of the human/chimpanzee separation in the separation in the mitoc ...

Cooper, A. and Penny, D. (1997) ‘Mass survival of birds across the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary: molecular evidence’, Science, 2 ...

Gu, X., Fu, Y.-X. and Li, W.-H. (1995) ‘Maximum likelihood estimation of the heterogeneity of substitution rate among nucleotide ...

Lockhart, P.J., Steel, M.A., Hendy, M.D. and Penny, D. (1994) ‘Recovering evolutionary trees under a more realistic model of seq ...

Rickards, R.B. (2000) ‘The age of the earliest clubmosses: the Silurian Baragwanathia flora in Victoria, Australia’, Geological ...

Wang, D.Y.-C., Kumar, S. and Hedges, S.B. (1998) ‘Divergence time estimates for the early history of animal phyla and the origin ...

Chapter 4 The quality of the fossil record Michael J.Benton ABSTRACT Ever since the days of Charles Darwin, palaeontologists hav ...

the Quaternary (Klicka and Zink 1997). However, most estimates of a ages from molecules match the fossil ages closely (Hedges an ...

Benton 1999b; Foote et al. 1999; Lee 1999; Conway Morris 2000) have stressed the propensity of molecular methods to overestimate ...

Sampling methods Two main approaches have been used by palaeontologists in assessing the completeness of their fossil records: c ...