Journal article
Comparative dating of Acacia: combining fossils and multiple phylogenies to infer ages of clades with poor fossil records
Joseph T Miller, Daniel J Murphy, Simon YW Ho, David J Cantrill, David Seigler
Australian Journal of Botany | CSIRO PUBLISHING | Published : 2013
DOI: 10.1071/BT13149
Abstract
The ubiquitous and highly diverse element Australian Acacia makes an ideal candidate for investigating a range of questions about the evolution of the flora of continental Australia. In the past, such efforts have been hampered by a lack of well-supported phylogenies and by the relatively poor macrofossil record, which probably reflects the depositional environment in which Acacia species are predominantly found. However, the broader subfamily Mimosoideae offers several reliably age-constrained fossils that can be used as calibrations in divergence-dating analyses of DNA sequence data. In addition, the microfossil pollen record of Acacia is relatively rich and provides a good age constraint ..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council
Awarded by NSF
Awarded by National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the Hermon Slade Foundation, the Taxonomy Research and Information Network (TRIN), which is funded by the Australian Commonwealth Environment Research Facilities program, and the Australian Research Council. J. T. M acknowledges NSF-Systematic Biology grant NSF-DEB 04-14902; D. J. M. acknowledges support from the Australian Research Council (grants LP0669625 and DP1093100); and D. S. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation (NSFBSR 82-15274, NSF-PCM82-17114, NSF-DEB04-15803), University of Illinois Research Board (1994, 2001) and a Rupert Barneby Award from the New York Botanical Garden (1997).