MBE Advance Access originally published online on October 17, 2006
Molecular Biology and Evolution 2007 24(1):26-53; doi:10.1093/molbev/msl150
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Paleontological Evidence to Date the Tree of Life
Department of Earth Sciences, Wills Memorial Building, Queen's Road, Bristol BS8 1RJ, UK
E-mail: mike.benton{at}bris.ac.uk.
Accepted for publication October 10, 2006.
The role of fossils in dating the tree of life has been misunderstood. Fossils can provide good "minimum" age estimates for branches in the tree, but "maximum" constraints on those ages are poorer. Current debates about which are the "best" fossil dates for calibration move to consideration of the most appropriate constraints on the ages of tree nodes. Because fossil-based dates are constraints, and because molecular evolution is not perfectly clock-like, analysts should use more rather than fewer dates, but there has to be a balance between many genes and few dates versus many dates and few genes. We provide "hard" minimum and "soft" maximum age constraints for 30 divergences among key genome model organisms; these should contribute to better understanding of the dating of the animal tree of life.
Key Words: tree of life • paleontological dating • calibration • quality of fossil record
Sudhir Kumar, Associate Editor
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