Science Alert has a story of a new open-access fossil database. Known as the Fossil Calibration Database, the free, open, online resource was created by a group of 20 researchers from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the Indiana University, and others. The project was led by Daniel Ksepla, a science curator at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT. The data will be hosted by the journal Palaeontologia Electronica. It joins other online fossil databases like the Paleobiology Database.
The database brings together peer-reviewed fossil information, and it will help scientists from around the world calibrate their 'molecular clocks'.
Right now, scientists compare changes between the DNA of living species to map out how long ago they diverged on life's family tree. But by comparing this information to the fossil record, they can get some sense of a timescale, and hopefully will be able to one day date all of the branching points on the tree of life.
“Molecular dating uses fossils as calibrations to inform our models of how the rate of DNA evolution varies among species, to estimate the time key groups of plants and animals evolved,” said Matthew Phillips, an evolutionary biologist from QUT, in a press release.
He explains that up until now, a lot of these evolutionary genetic studies have been calibrated using outdated and sometimes even incorrect fossil data.
“There has been a lot of disagreement between fossil and DNA researchers on the timing of major events in life’s history," added Phillips in the release. "But the new database will help them find common ground by providing molecular biologists with carefully vetted fossil data for organisms right across the tree of life.”
