Evolution against the clock? Developing critical methods to investigate the molecular clock/fossil record mismatch

Major evolutionary radiations such as the origin of the animals are usually dated today using molecular clock techniques, which rely on differences in DNA or amino acids from living organisms. However, the date estimates thus obtained often greatly overestimate those from the fossil record. In this project, we aim to find out why.

The work is in three interlinked suprojects: A) Investigation of the controls on published molecular clock results, with a focus on how they are calibrated from the fossil record.

This will involve rerunning published analyses with different parameters to create a complete "map" of their variation; B) Building a statistical model of what early fossil records should look like, building on our previous work; and groundtruthing this against the fossil record of arthropods and their relatives in the Cambrian; C) Informing our understanding of the early evolution of arthopods and their relatives (and thus their expected early fossil record) by investigating body plan development in onychophorans and priapulid worms, using state-of the-art single cell sequencing techniques.

A PhD student will be required for subproject 1 and parts of subproject 2.

We expect this project to have a sigificant effect in both our understanding of the fossil record and its fidelity, and in the broader picture of early animal evolution and development: it brings together a unique constellation of palaeobiological, statistical and developmental expertise.