The popularity of relaxed clock Bayesian inference of clade origin timings has generated
several recent publications with focal results considerably older than the fossils of the clades …

Recent controversy about the use of the vertebrate fossil record for external calibration of
molecular clocks centers on two issues, the number of dates used for calibration and the …

It has recently been argued that living metazoans diverged over 800 million years ago,
based on evidence from 22 nuclear genes for such a deep divergence between vertebrates …

The timing of divergences among metazoan lineages is integral to understanding the
processes of animal evolution, placing the biological events of species divergences into the …

The fossil record serves a crucial function as an external calibration for genomic clocks and
molecular evolutionary timescales. Although certain portions of the vertebrate fossil record …

The fossil record has long supported the view that most animal phyla originated during a
brief period approximately 520 MYA known as the Cambrian explosion. However, molecular …

Molecular clocks can be evaluated by comparing absolute rates of evolution and by
performing relative-rate tests. Typically, calculations of absolute rates are based on earliest …

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 …

The evolutionary emergence of animals is one of the most significant episodes in the history
of life, but its timing remains poorly constrained. Molecular clocks estimate that animals …

With the introduction of relaxed-clock molecular dating methods, the role of fossil calibration
has expanded from providing a timescale, to also informing the models for molecular rate …