Gilles Didier

The paper introduces a novel method to identify evolutionary shifts in quantitative characters by using an asymmetric version of linear parsimony, showing it can produce splits consistent with previous stochastic methods.

The paper compares ancestral state reconstruction methods for quantitative characters and finds that maximum likelihood is most accurate, while performance declines with increasing evolutionary drift.

The paper proposes a method to estimate diversification rates using only fossil ages in phylogenetic trees, showing it is nearly as accurate as methods using all temporal data.