Estimating Diversity Through Time Using Molecular Phylogenies: Old and Species-Poor Frog Families are the Remnants of a Diverse Past

Estimating how the number of species in a given group varied in the deep past is of key interest to evolutionary biologists. However, current phylogenetic approaches for obtaining such estimates have limitations, such as providing unrealistic diversity estimates at the origin of the group. Here, we develop a robust probabilistic approach for estimating diversity through time curves and uncertainty around these estimates from phylogenetic data....