PhD: Dating clades in the fossil record

The PhD student will be expected to undertake a systematic survey of published molecular clock results to understand their dependencies, and to simulate trees and data for stress-testing available clock packages. In addition, the project will extract data from the fossil record to better understand the patterns of first appearances of various clades. The final part of the project involves investigation of various of types of rate heterogeneity in the evolutionary process and how this might affect clock and fossil clade origin estimates.