News Finding: But he believes future iterations of this approach--incorporating fossil traits into the analysis--will yield a powerful new tool: "All the cool kids will be doing it soon."
Paper Finding: However, the same study showed that phylogenetic relationships in a ''Cambrian bush'' are resolvable if elevated evolutionary rates during the critical time window generated large suites of changes on chronologically short branches.
News Context: He points out that while the study uses fossil data to determine when a given arthropod branch emerged, it doesn't include the known characteristics of these extinct ancestors in its comparisons of physical traits, which involve only living creatures. Some of the assumptions the authors make in estimating these emergence dates are also problematic, says Philip Donoghue, a paleobiologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. But he believes future iterations of this approach--incorporating fossil traits into the analysis--will yield a powerful new tool: "All the cool kids will be doing it soon."
Paper Context: That study suggested that reconstructing relationships between Cambrian lineages would be essentially impossible assuming constant evolutionary rates, unless they diverged gradually over a time period of >100 Myr. However, the same study showed that phylogenetic relationships in a ''Cambrian bush'' are resolvable if elevated evolutionary rates during the critical time window generated large suites of changes on chronologically short branches. Our results support this possibility, and the numbers are highly consistent.