Molecular-dating techniques potentially enable us to estimate the time of origin of any
biological lineage. Such techniques were originally premised on the assumption of a …

In the past, molecular clocks have been used to estimate divergence times among animal
phyla, but those time estimates have varied widely (1200–670 million years ago, Ma). In …

The estimation of phylogenetic divergence times from sequence data is an important
component of many molecular evolutionary studies. There is now a general appreciation …

The molecular clock has played an important role in biological research, both as a
description of the evolutionary process and as a tool for inferring evolutionary timescales …

Background Ectomycorrhizae (ECM) are symbioses formed by polyphyletic assemblages of
fungi (mostly Agaricomycetes) and plants (mostly Pinaceae and angiosperms in the rosid …

The molecular clock presents a means of estimating evolutionary rates and timescales using
genetic data. These estimates can lead to important insights into evolutionary processes and …

The fossil and geologic records provide the primary data used to established absolute
timescales for timetrees. For the paleontological evaluation of proposed timetree timescales …

The age of the angiosperms has long been of interest to botanists and evolutionary
biologists. Many early efforts to date the age of the angiosperms and evolutionary …

Bayesian methods are increasingly being used to estimate divergence times without the
restrictive assumption of a global clock. Little is known about their reliability for shallow …

A major concern in molecular clock dating is how to use information from the fossil record to
calibrate genetic distances from DNA sequences. Here we apply three Bayesian dating …