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MBE Advance Access published online on October 17, 2006
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msl150
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Accepted October 10, 2006

Review

Paleontological Evidence to Date the Tree of Life

Michael J. Benton 1 * and Philip C. J. Donoghue 1

1 Department of Earth Sciences, Wills Memorial Building, Queen's Road, Bristol BS8 1RJ, UK

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Michael J. Benton, E-mail: mike.benton{at}bris.ac.uk


  Abstract

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 vs. 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.

Keywords: tree of life; paleontological dating; calibration; quality of fossil record.
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