Our goal is to date a near-complete Lamiaceae backbone phylogeny using molecular data and fossil evidence. Using topologies and taxon schemes provided by The Open Tree of Life, we reconstructed the backbone phylogeny for the family with roughly 75% of all 7,000+ taxa represented. We are now working to date all divergences in the phylogeny ranging from subfamilial down to some individual species relationships. A subset phylogeny consisting of the ~2,500 mint taxa that have sufficient GenBank data has been fully dated, and we already have dates for all of the deep divergences such as subfamilies and many large clades therein.

Our next steps are to transfer these dates onto the more complete phylogeny consisting of additional taxa that do not have published molecular data. From there, we will also impute dates for nodes in the larger phylogeny for which there are no nodes in the smaller phylogeny by splitting the difference between two adjacent nodes with known dates. Once a completely dated backbone phylogeny is established, we will perform various downstream analyses including looking at chemical diversity and whole genome duplications over time.