Integration of fungal evolution with the dates of plate tectonic movements, paleoecology, and
the evolution of plants and animals requires a molecular clock. Imperfect though they may …

Dating of fungal divergences with molecular clocks thus far has yielded highly inconsistent
results. The origin of fungi was estimated at between 660 million and up to 2.15 billion y ago …

The collection of papers in this issue of Mycologia documents considerable improvements in
taxon sampling and phylogenetic resolution regarding the Fungal Tree of Life. The new data …

The fossil record is well known to be incomplete. Read literally, it provides a distorted view of
the history of species divergence and extinction, because different species have different …

Phylogenetic estimates of evolutionary timescales can be obtained from nucleotide
sequence data using the molecular clock. These estimates are important for our …

Background Molecular dating has gained ever-increasing interest since the molecular clock
hypothesis was proposed in the 1960s. Molecular dating provides detailed temporal …

▪ Abstract Molecular and paleontological data provide independent means of estimating
when groups of organisms evolved in the geological past, but neither approach can be …

Molecular dating has become central to placing a temporal dimension on the tree of life.
Methods for estimating divergence times have been developed for over 50 years, beginning …

Background Molecular clock methodologies allow for the estimation of divergence times
across a variety of organisms; this can be particularly useful for groups lacking robust fossil …

Heterochronous data sets comprise molecular sequences sampled at different points in
time. If the temporal range of the sampled sequences is large relative to the rate of mutation …