Inferring diversification rate variation from phylogenies with fossils

Time-calibrated phylogenies of living species have been widely used to study the tempo and mode of species diversification. However, it is increasingly clear that inferences about species diversification — extinction rates in particular — can be unreliable in the absence of paleontological data. We introduce a general framework based on the fossilized birth-death process for studying speciation-extinction dynamics on phylogenies of extant and extinct species. Our model assumes that phylogenies can be modeled as a mixture of distinct evolutionary rate regimes and that a hierarchical Poisson process governs the number of such rate regimes across a tree. We implemented the model in BAMM, a computational framework that uses reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo to simulate a posterior distribution of macroevolutionary rate regimes conditional on the branching times and topology of a phylogeny. The implementation we describe can be applied to paleontological phylogenies, neontological phy...