Attendees are asked to read over the following four readings, at their discretion, before the workshop. The following list is rank-ordered; if you only read one, read the first, but if you read two, read the first two. The first two (Wright, 2017; Wright, 2019) in particular are important and comprehensive reviews of concepts specifically tied to the topics of this short course: respectively, morphological Bayesian phylogenetics and use of the fossilized birth-death-sampling model in inferring phylogenetic trees. Holder & Lewis covers the basics of Bayesian phylogenetics, while Nee covers what birth-death models are, and covers their history of use in paleontology and systematics.
If you cannot access any of the above, please contact the organizers, particularly D. Bapst.
During the workshop, we will be mostly discussing applying analyses to a dataset taken from Smith & Zamora’s 2009 study of early Paleozoic cinctan echinoderms. Reading their study is encouraged but will likely be less useful than reading the four papers above.
The popular regular webinar series, PhyloSeminar recently hosted a four-part series by Paul Lewis that act as a good primer to the basics of phylogenetics (Part 1), the basics of tree likelihood (Part 2), and the basics of MCMC-based Bayesian phylogenetics (parts 3a & 3b), and we recommend these to participants who want more detailed background on phylogenetics work. The recorded lectures are on Youtube, and the slides for each part are also available: