Fossils Do Not Substantially Improve, and May Even Harm, Estimates of Diversification Rate Heterogeneity
There is a prevailing view that the inclusion of fossil data could remedy identifiability issues related to models of diversification, by drastically reducing the number of congruent models. The fossilized birth-death (FBD) model is an appealing way of directly incorporating fossil information when estimating diversification rates. Here we explore the benefits of including fossils by implementing and then testing two-types of FBD models in more complex likelihood-based models that assume multiple rate classes across the tree. We also assess the impact of severely undersampling, and even not including fossils that represent samples of lineages that also had sampled descendants (i.e., k-type fossils), as well as converting a fossil set to represent stratigraphic ranges. Under various simulation scenarios, including a scenario that exists far outside the set of models we evaluated, including fossils rarely outperforms analyses that exclude them altogether. At best, the inclusion of fossils improves precision but does not influence bias. We also found that severely undercounting the number of k-type fossils produces highly inflated rates of turnover and extinction fraction. Similarly, we found that converting the fossil set to stratigraphic ranges results in turnover rates and extinction fraction estimates that are generally underestimated. While fossils remain essential for understanding diversification through time, in the specific case of understanding diversification given an existing, largely modern tree, they are not especially beneficial.