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Phylogenetic Signal and Bias in Paleontology

Asher, R.J.; Smith, M.R

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Authors

R.J. Asher



Abstract

An unprecedented amount of evidence now illuminates the phylogeny of living mammals and birds on the Tree of Life. We use this tree to measure phylogenetic value of data typically used in paleontology (bones and teeth) from six datasets derived from five published studies. We ask three interrelated questions: 1) Can these data adequately reconstruct known parts of the Tree of Life? 2) Is accuracy generally similar for studies using morphology, or do some morphological datasets perform better than others? 3) Does the loss of non-fossilizable data cause taxa to occur in misleadingly basal positions? Adding morphology to DNA datasets usually increases congruence of resulting topologies to the well corroborated tree, but this varies among morphological datasets. Extant taxa with a high proportion of missing morphological characters can greatly reduce phylogenetic resolution when analyzed together with fossils. Attempts to ameliorate this by deleting extant taxa missing morphology are prone to decreased accuracy due to long-branch artefacts. We find no evidence that fossilization causes extinct taxa to incorrectly appear at or near topologically basal branches. Morphology comprises the evidence held in common by living taxa and fossils, and phylogenetic analysis of fossils greatly benefits from inclusion of molecular and morphological data sampled for living taxa, whatever methods are used for phylogeny estimation.

Citation

Asher, R., & Smith, M. (2022). Phylogenetic Signal and Bias in Paleontology. Systematic Biology, 71(4), 986-1008. https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syab072

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Aug 27, 2021
Online Publication Date Sep 1, 2021
Publication Date 2022-07
Deposit Date Aug 31, 2021
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Systematic Biology
Print ISSN 1063-5157
Electronic ISSN 1076-836X
Publisher Oxford University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 71
Issue 4
Pages 986-1008
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syab072

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society of Systematic Biologists.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contactjournals.permissions@oup.com




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