Bayesian total evidence dating reveals the recent crown radiation of penguins
Alexandra Gavryushkina, Tracy A. Heath, Daniel T. Ksepka, Tanja, Stadler, David Welch, and Alexei J. Drummond

TL;DR
This paper introduces a Bayesian total-evidence dating method using the fossilized birth-death process, revealing that modern penguins diversified much more recently than previously thought, mainly within the last 2 million years.
Contribution
It develops a new Bayesian total-evidence approach incorporating the FBD model to improve divergence time estimates using fossil and molecular data.
Findings
Modern penguins radiated around 12.7 million years ago.
Most extant penguin species diverged within the last 2 million years.
Including fossil diversity enhances divergence time accuracy.
Abstract
The total-evidence approach to divergence-time dating uses molecular and morphological data from extant and fossil species to infer phylogenetic relationships, species divergence times, and macroevolutionary parameters in a single coherent framework. Current model-based implementations of this approach lack an appropriate model for the tree describing the diversification and fossilization process and can produce estimates that lead to erroneous conclusions. We address this shortcoming by providing a total-evidence method implemented in a Bayesian framework. This approach uses a mechanistic tree prior to describe the underlying diversification process that generated the tree of extant and fossil taxa. Previous attempts to apply the total-evidence approach have used tree priors that do not account for the possibility that fossil samples may be direct ancestors of other samples. The…
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