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Project Progress

In year three, Charles Marshall of the Harvard NAI team began a new subproject on molecular evolution and phylogeny as part of the NAI Focus Group in Evogenomics. Research in year 4 focused on improving confidence intervals in paleontological estmates of evolutionary first and last appearances of taxa and on reconciling molecular clock and paleontological estimates of evolutionary divergence times. Research has also continued on the construction of a global database for the fossil record that will enable paleontologists to understand the history of biological diversity and facilitate the differentiation of the biological from geological signals in Phanerozoic marine diversity studies. In an important development, Marshall and his students have shown that the algorithm from which it was inferred that marine diversity has not increased since the Paleozoic era fails to take beta diversity into account.