Meeting Abstract
The tree of life metaphor has been used since Darwin to depict the evolutionary relationships among all organisms. To approach this goal, recent advances in sequencing technology, as well a supermatrix and supertree approaches, have helped biologists generated large, well-sampled phylogenies. Although completely-sampled phylogenies remain rare in large clades, the comparative methods that researchers use are commonly believed to accommodate incompletely sampled phylogenies. We show that incompletely sampled phylogenies, can in some cases result in less accurate estimates of diversification rate. We then develop a new method to place unsampled species onto an existing backbone phylogeny, using taxonomic information and local estimates of diversification rate. We demonstrate this method on the largest ray-finned fish phylogeny assembled with over 11,000 tips, to create the complete fish tree of life consisting of 31,526 species. Adding unsampled lineages to our backbone phylogeny improves estimates of tip-specific speciation rates for over 60% of our sampled lineages, while also supplying a measure of uncertainty around this new estimate. Our method therefore permits a more detailed estimate of macroevolutionary rate compared to using an incompletely sampled phylogeny.
