Neutral biodiversity models predict species ages that are unrealistically long—sometimes exceeding even the age of the Earth. But the exact extent of the problem with these models has been unknown until now, because we have lacked analytical species age formulas appropriate to ecological contexts. In our new paper, we have derived such formulas and used them to provide new neutral estimates of species ages of tropical trees. We show that neutral species ages are still too long, but by about a factor of ten less than previously thought.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040580914000161

Photo by Christian Ziegler