This book presents coverage of the principles and practice of molecular clocks, which have provided fascinating and unprecedented insights into the evolutionary timescale of life on earth. It begins by following the early development of the molecular evolutionary clock in the 1960s, and leads to the complex statistical approaches that are now used to analyse genome sequences. The chapters of this book have been contributed by leading experts in the field and address the important issues of evolutionary rates, molecular dating, and phylogenomic analysis. This is the first time that these different aspects of the molecular clock have been brought together in a single, comprehensive volume. It is an invaluable reference for students and researchers interested in evolutionary biology, genetic analysis, and genomic evolution. 

Part 1. Introduction

Chapter 1. The Molecular Clock and Evolutionary Rates Across the Tree of Life
Chapter 2. Molecular Evolution: A Brief Introduction
Chapter 3. Spontaneous Mutation Rates
Chapter 4. Causes of Variation in the Rate of Molecular Evolution
Part 2. Molecular Dating
Chapter 5. Principles of Molecular Dating
Chapter 6. Bayesian Molecular Dating
Chapter 7. Clock Models for Evolution of Discrete Phenotypic Characters
Chapter 8. Calibrations from the Fossil Record
Part 3. Calibrating Molecular Clocks
Chapter 9. Biogeographic Dating of Phylogenetic Divergence Times Using Priors and Processes
Chapter 10. Estimating evolutionary rates and timescales from time-stamped data
Chapter 11. Total-Evidence Dating and the Fossilized Birth-Death Model
Part 4. Phylogenomics
Chapter 12. Efficient methods for dating evolutionary divergences
Chapter 13. Bayesian Phylogenomic Dating.