The Occurrence Birth-Death Diffusion Process: Unraveling Diversification Histories with Fossils and Heterogeneous Rates

Phylogenetic diversification analyses often overlook the wealth of information contained in fossils that cannot be directly integrated into phylogenetic trees (called fossil occurrences), as well as fine-grained variations in speciation and extinction rates across lineages. Addressing both of these shortcomings, we develop the Occurrence Birth-Death Diffusion (OBDD) process. This process incorporates the sampling of fossil occurrences by extending the recently developed Fossilized Birth-Death Diffusion (FBDD) process, thereby taking advantage of a clade’s entire fossil record to infer its evolutionary history. To mitigate the computational challenges associated with the OBDD process, we employ Bayesian data augmentation methods. We illustrate our approach with an empirical analysis of cetacean diversification. Our analyses show that the integration of fossils is essential to recover diversification rates and richness trajectories. More specifically, all types of fossils are highly informative about past diversification dynamics, but fossil occurrences do not provide significant additional information when the phylogeny already contains many fossils. We make the OBDD available in the Julia package Tapestree.