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Genes are often uninformative for dating species’ origins

The time frame of a species’ origins provides context for evolutionary questions. However, dates from fossils are often inconsistent with estimates from genetic data. Emerging evidence points to a new explanation for this discrepancy.
  1. Matt Pennell

    1. Matt Pennell is in the Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology and the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA.

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The history of Earth is characterized by massive extinction events and the expansion of newly emerging groups of organisms. The timing of these extinctions is increasingly well understood, but it has been difficult to pin down dates for the origin of many important groups, including animals, mammals, flowering plants and beetles. A large amount of this uncertainty comes from the conflict between ages estimated solely from the fossil record and those derived from a combination of fossil data and the analysis of genetic differences between living species, known as the molecular clock. For example, analyses using molecular-clock methods date the origin of bilaterians — a group that includes whales, worms and humans — to between 688 million and 596 million years ago1 but, when examining only the fossil record, the date is around 555 million years ago2. Writing in Systematic Biology, Budd and Mann3 provide insights into why this time gap has remained so persistent.

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Nature 624, 51-52 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03487-4

References

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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