Assessing the Adequacy of Morphological Models used in Palaeobiology

Abstract

Reconstructing the evolutionary history of different groups of organisms provides insight into how life originated and diversified on Earth. Phylogenetic trees are commonly used to estimate this evolutionary history, providing a hypothesis of the events. Within Bayesian phylogenetics a major step in estimating a tree is in choosing an appropriate model of character evolution. In the case of most extinct species, our only source of information to decipher their phylogenetic relationships is through the morphology of fossils. We therefore use a model of morphological character evolution, the most common of which being the Mk Lewis model. While it is frequently used in palaeobiology, it is not known whether the simple Mk substitution model, or any extensions to it, provide a sufficiently good description of the process of morphological evolution. To determine whether or not the Mk model is appropriate for fossil data we used posterior predictive simulations, a model adequacy approach, to estimate absolute fit of the model to morphological data sets. We first investigate the impact that different versions of the Mk model have on key parameter estimates using tetrapod data sets. We show that choice of substitution model has an impact on both topology and branch lengths, highlighting the importance of model choice. Next, we use simulations to investigate the power of posterior predictive simulations for morphology. Having validated this approach we show that current variations of the Mk model are in fact performing adequately in capturing the evolutionary dynamics that generated our data. We do not find any preference for a particular model extension across multiple data sets, indicating that there is no `one size fits all' when it comes to morphological data and that careful consideration should be given to choosing models of discrete character evolution. By using suitable models of character evolution, we can increase our confidence in our phylogenetic estimates, which should in turn allow us to gain more accurate insights into the evolutionary history of both extinct and extant taxa.