Phylogenetics and the Fossil Record

Undergraduate / Graduate

Phylogenies are branching diagrams that reflect evolutionary relationships. In addition to providing information on the history of life, phylogenies are fundamental to modern methods for studying macroevolutionary and macroecological pattern and process. In the biological sciences, phylogenies are most often inferred from genetic data. In paleobiology, phylogenies can only be inferred from the fossilized remains of morphological structures, and collecting and analyzing morphological data present a different set of challenges. In this course, students will study both traditional and state-of-the-art approaches to inferring phylogenies in the fossil record, from data collection to interpretation. Lectures will explore the statistical underpinnings of phylogenetic methods, as well as their practical implementation in commonly used software. Topics will include: identifying and coding morphological characters, models of morphological evolution, parsimony, maximum likelihood, and bayesian methods, supertree approaches, and integrating time into phylogenetic inference. Fifty percent of the final assessment will come from a research paper due at the end of the quarter.