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Systematic Biology Advance Access originally published online on August 7, 2009
Systematic Biology 2009 58(4):461-462; doi:10.1093/sysbio/syp042
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© Society of Systematic Biologists

The Timetree of Life

David A. Morrison

Section for Parasitology (SWEPAR), Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, 751 89 Uppsala, Sweden

E-mail: david.morrison@bvf.slu.se.

The Timetree of Life.—S. Blair Hedges and Sudhir Kumar, editors. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xxi+551 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-953503-3. $US200, £100 (hardback).

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Historically, phylogenetic analysis in systematics has focused on the branching order of the taxa, with less attention being given to branch lengths. Evolutionists and palaeontologists have more frequently had the opposite bias, with a specific interest in the timescale of the bifurcations, which requires at least estimates of relative branch lengths. If the phylogenetic tree can be calibrated in some way, such as by the use of fossils, then the tree can also be scaled to absolute times. A phylogenetic tree scaled to absolute time is, in this new book, referred to as a "timetree."

The objective of the book is an ambitious one: to produce a state-of-the art synthesis of the absolute timescales of all of life based on molecular data. To this end, a large collection of authors has been assembled to construct timetrees for as many taxonomic groups as possible. The bulk of the book consists of . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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