Data partitioning and correction for ascertainment bias reduce the uncertainty of placental mammal divergence times inferred from the morphological clock.

ABSTRACT: Bayesian estimates of divergence times based on the molecular clock yield uncertainty of parameter estimates measured by the width of posterior distributions of node ages. For the relaxed molecular clock, previous works have reported that some of the uncertainty inherent to the variation of rates among lineages may be reduced by partitioning data. Here we test this effect for the purely morphological clock, using placental mammals as a case study. We applied the uncorrelated lognormal relaxed clock to morphological data of 40 extant mammalian taxa and 4,533 characters, taken from the largest published matrix of discrete phenotypic characters. The morphologically derived timescale was compared to divergence times inferred from molecular and combined data. We show that partitioning data into

SUBMITTER: Caldas IV 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6392387 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature