Long-term evolutionary dynamics have been approached through quantitative analysis of the fossil record, but without explicitly taking its incompleteness into account. Here we explore the temporal covariance structure of per-genus origination and extinction rates for global marine fossil genera throughout the Phanerozoic, both before and after corrections for the incompleteness of the fossil re...

The fossil record documents over three billion years of evolution. Darwin considered the general succession of morphologies in the fossil record to corroborate the basic idea of evolution by natural selection. However, he also recognized aspects of the fossil record that challenged his ideas. For example, did the sudden appearance of higher taxa reflect a different underlying model of evolution...

Biogeography played an important role in early developments in evolutionary theory and continues to play an important role in evolutionary studies and paleogeographic reconstructions. The development of a phylogenetic approach to biogeographic analysis has been important; however, fossil taxa have not always played a role in phylogenetic biogeographic studies and their role has been criticized ...

Traditionally, patterns and processes of diversification could only be inferred from the fossil record. However, there are an increasing number of tools that enable diversification dynamics to be inferred from molecular phylogenies. The application of these tools to new data sets has renewed interest in the question of the prevalence of diversity-dependent diversification. However, there is gro...

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 propensities to fossilize, the amount of rock fluctuates over geological timescales, as does the nature of the environments that it preserves. Even so, patterns in the fossil evidence allow us to assess the i...

Both the fossil record and molecular data support a long evolutionary history for the Araceae. Although the family is diverse in tropical America today, most araceous fossils, however, have been recorded from middle and high latitudes. Here, we report fossil leaves of Araceae from the middle-late Paleocene of northern Colombia, and review fossil araceous pollen grains from the same interval. Tw...

Some molecular clock estimates of divergence times of taxonomic groups undergoing evolutionary radiation are much older than the groups' first observed fossil record. Mathematical models of branching evolution are used to estimate the maximal rate of fossil preservation consistent with a postulated missing history, given the sum of species durations implied by early origins under a range of spe...

The pre-Cenozoic bryophyte fossil record is significantly sparser than that of vascular plants or Cenozoic bryophytes. This situation has been traditionally attributed to a hypothesized low preservation potential of the plants. However, instances of excellent pre-Cenozoic bryophyte preservation and the results of experiments simulating fossilization contradict this traditional interpretation, s...

Assessing the extent to which population subdivision during cladogenesis is necessary for long-term phenotypic evolution is of fundamental importance in a broad range of biological disciplines. Differentiating cladogenesis from anagenesis, defined as evolution within a species, has generally been hampered by dating precision, insufficient fossil data, and difficulties in establishing a direct l...