Integrative phylogenetics: tools for palaeontologists to explore the tree of life

The new era of analytical and quantitative palaeobiology has only just begun, integrating methods from morphological and molecular phylogenetics, divergence time estimation and phenotypic and molecular rates of evolution. Calibrating the tree of life to geological time is at the nexus of many disparate disciplines, from palaeontology to molecular systematics and from geochronology to genomics. Creating an evolutionary timescale of the major events that shaped biodiversity is key to all of these fields and draws from each. Different methodological approaches and data employed by different disciplines have traditionally made collaborative research efforts difficult among these disciplines. However, the development of new methods is reading the historical gap among fields, providing a holistic perspective on organismal evolutionary history, integrating all of the available evidence from living and fossil species. Therefore, these new methods provide ample and new opportunities for evolutionary biologists to benefit from palaeontological data to help establishing an evolutionary timescale and to test core macroevolutionary hypotheses about the drivers of diversification. Given that phylogenies with only extant taxa do not contain enough information for neither calibrating the tree of life nor for reliably or fully inferring macroevolutionary dynamics, phylogenies should preferably include both extant and extinct taxa, which can only be done through the inclusion of phenotypic data.