A stochastic rate-calibrated method for time-scaling phylogenies of fossil taxa

1.) Applying phylogeny-based analyses of trait evolution and diversification in the fossil record generally involves transforming an unscaled cladogram into a phylogeny scaled to geologic time. Current methods produce single time-scaled phylogenies with artificial zero-length branches and no indication of the uncertainty in the temporal relationships. 2.) Here I present a stochastic algorithm for time-scaling phylogenies of fossil taxa by randomly sampling node ages from a constrained distribution, with the ultimate goal of producing large samples of time-scaled phylogenies for a given dataset as the basis for phylogeny-based analyses. I describe how this stochastic approach can be extended to consider potential ancestral relationships and resolve polytomies. 3) The stochastic selection of node ages in this algorithm is weighted by the probability density of the total inferable unobserved evolutionary history at single divergence events in a tree, a distribution dependent on rates of br...