Nature 446, 507–512 (2007)

We have discovered a bug in the Perl script relDate v.2.2 that was used in part to date the nodes in the species-level mammalian supertree presented and analysed in our Article. The bug affected all but 80 of the 2,109 published dates, generally causing them to be slightly inflated, with the effect being stronger in more recent nodes. The absolute errors are mostly small (mean and median change of 1.32 and 0.70 million years, respectively), and a strong correlation between the two sets of dates exists (r = 0.990); however, 25 dates (all within Chiroptera) do change by more than 10 million years. Four of these dates are associated with the paraphyletic genus Hipposideros, whereas the remaining 21 cover most of Molossidae. The errors do not affect the results or overall conclusions of our paper qualitatively.

The Supplementary Information, including the tree files, has now been amended and can be accessed through the Supplementary Information link of the original Article. An additional file with a version of the amended Article can be accessed at http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/molekularesystematik/ under the ‘Publikationen/Publications’ link.