Telling the Evolutionary Time: Molecular Clocks and the Fossil Record

to modern orders, but they generally have only one or two synapomorphies of those orders (Dyke 2001), and the full suite of dist ...

Figure 4.11 The known fossil record of modern bird gr oups gives no indication that fossil finds can be expected in the Cretac e ...

Group sampling Foote and Raup (1996) developed a simple method to derive an empirical estimate of sampling at group level, which ...

worthwhile to repeat their experiment, but with fuller documentation. It is wrong to assume that all we know about continental v ...

Palaeocene (70–60 Ma), much younger than most molecular estimates of origins, at 70– 120 Ma. Rapprochement The dating of the rad ...

Evidence for a poor-quality fossil record Heterogeneity It is clear that the fossil record contains a biotic and an abiotic sign ...

expands and contracts as does the volume of the sea. Either way of course the fossil record is much weakened as an accurate docu ...

are merely artefacts of variations in available rock volume, or that mass extinctions and reductions in rock volume are associat ...

rocks, and the exposed area of rocks, as a result of the cumulative effects of burial, metamorphism, subduction, erosion, and co ...

Alroy et al. (2001) have now suggested that Raup (1972) might well have been correct. In the first publication from the Paleobio ...

palaeontologists to escape from the risk of circularity in using internal measures of the fossil record to assess the quality of ...

Metrics Trees and fossil sequences may be compared in various ways, and several metrics have been proposed (reviewed in Benton e ...

have abandoned use of this approach (Benton and Hitchin 1996; Hitchin and Benton 1997; Wagner 1998). We have used three measures ...

realistic metrics outlined above confirmed that roughly three-quarters of published trees are congruent with the fossil record ( ...

that arthropods on the whole show poorer age-clade congruence than vertebrates, but he could not readily explain this observatio ...

Conclusion The fossil record is, as ever, under close scrutiny. Current viewpoints range from gung-ho to abject despair. The gun ...

Acknowledgements Supported by Leverhulme Grant F/182/AK. Many thanks to Andrew Smith for his critical comments and advice on the ...

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