Correction to "Phylogenetic evidence for a shift in the mode of mammalian body size evolution at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary", and a note on fitting macroevolutionary models to comparative paleontological datasets

Abstract

In a recent paper (Slater 2013), I described and implemented two "mode shift" models, where a continuous trait evolves under an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) process over the basal portion of a phylogenetic tree and shifts to an unconstrained Brownian Motion (BM) process, with or without a novel variance parameter, at a user specified time before the present day. There were two related errors in this paper that are here corrected. First, the equations describing elements of the phylogenetic variance-covariance matrices for these models (Slater 2013, Equations 2 & 4) were incorrect. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.