Molecular Clock Dating using MrBayes

Abstract

This paper provides an overview and a tutorial of molecular clock dating using MrBayes, which is a software for Bayesian inference of phylogeny. Two modern approaches, total-evidence dating and node dating, are demonstrated using a dataset of Hymenoptera with molecular sequences and morphological characters. The similarity and difference of the two methods are compared and discussed. Besides, a non-clock analysis is performed on the same dataset to compare with the molecular clock dating analyses.