CO-ESTIMATION OF PHYLOGENY, DIVERGENCE TIME, AND MACROEVOLUTIONARY PARAMETERS IN FORMICIDAE

Ants [Formicidae] have a long and rich evolutionary history. The clade contains a great many fossils, including high-quality specimens preserved in amber. These amber-preserved specimens enable researchers to score morphological characters with a good degree of certainty, and to place these specimens precisely on the phylogeny. However, amber preservation is also discontinuous. This means that there is not one single rate at which fossils are preserved over the scale of history. In this talk, I will explore using the skyline fossilized birth-death to model differential rates of fossil preservation, speciation, and extinction over time. These values are obtained from joint estimation of the phylogeny, divergence times, and model parameters.