#2025SVP #SVP2025 Final Banquet loading... ⏳⏳⌛

Overall, between 100 and 500 variable characters are necessary to reach sufficient accuracy and precision of phylogenetic estimates for as low as 20 taxa. This is relevant not only for morphological phylogenetics, but also for gene trees and SNP-based estimates, and for Bayesian phylolinguistics.

Three different metrics of accuracy and precision were used to evaluate how good was the phylogenetic inference. General resulting patterns: more characters are better; more states are better (but this has little effect for >50 taxa); more taxa are worse for short trees, but better for long trees.

I designed this simulation study in RevBayes to perfectly match the models used for sim and inference. Any differences between the true tree generating data and the inferred tree(s) are due to dataset size. Parameters that varied across sims are: # characters, # taxa, tree length, and # states.

Out now in Biology Letters, my latest paper tackles an apparently simple question: how many characters are needed to reconstruct a phylogeny? TL;DR: in most cases between 100 and 500, more than a substantial portion of morphological datasets, but the story is more complex... doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

Non-exhaustive list of things you can find in our paper:
- A survey of all fossil tip-dating studies published until 2023
- A flowchart with all the steps to set up a tip-dating analysis
- Detailed discussion of all the elements making up a tip-dating analysis, from molecular alignment to FBD models

I am extremely happy to see that our review on fossil tip-dating is out in early view in Systematic Biology! A huge thanks to all the authors of this massive project (@heckeberg.bsky.social, @basantakhakurel.bsky.social, Gustavo Darlim, and @hoehna.bsky.social)! academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...