Death is on Our Side: Paleontological Data Drastically Modify Phylogenetic Hypotheses.

Area of Science:

• Evolutionary Biology
• Paleontology
• Systematics

Background:

• Phylogenetic trees, crucial for understanding evolution, are typically built using data from living organisms.
• The contribution of fossils to phylogenetic inference remains debated, with varying views on their impact due to incompleteness or unique evolutionary signals.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of including fossil data on phylogenetic inference.
• To quantitatively assess the factors that determine the influence of fossils on evolutionary tree reconstruction.

Main Methods:

• Conducted taxon addition experiments on empirical data matrices.
• Developed predictive models to identify determinants of topological change induced by fossil inclusion.

Main Results:

• Inclusion of paleontological data significantly impacts phylogenetic inference, often inducing stronger topological changes than increased sampling of extant taxa.
• Fossils uniquely rearrange tree topologies, enabling exploration of unexplored areas of treespace.
• Distinctive character state combinations in fossils are primary predictors of topological change.

Conclusions:

• Fossil data play a unique and crucial role in phylogenetic inference, complementing data from extant taxa.
• The impact of fossils on phylogenetic analyses can be predicted based on their unique character states.
• Findings have broad implications for designing taxon sampling strategies in morphological and total-evidence phylogenetic analyses.