We demonstrate the use of our model by analysing the Cenozoic fossil record of land plants and inferring dispersal and extinction rates across Eurasia and North America. We implement the DES model in a Bayesian framework and demonstrate through simulations that it can accurately infer all the relevant parameters. Rates can vary between areas and through time, thus providing the opportunity to assess complex scenarios of biogeographic evolution. The model estimates dispersal and extinction rates while explicitly accounting for the incompleteness of the fossil record. Here we present a new dispersal–extinction–sampling (DES) model, which estimates biogeographic parameters using fossil occurrences instead of phylogenetic trees.
Fossil data hold considerable information about past distribution of lineages, but suffer from largely incomplete sampling. However, extant taxa are likely to provide limited and potentially biased information about past biogeographic processes, due to extinction, asymmetrical dispersals and variable connectivity among areas.
Methods in historical biogeography have revolutionized our ability to infer the evolution of ancestral geographical ranges from phylogenies of extant taxa, the rates of dispersals, and biotic connectivity among areas.
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