Birth-death models, and their subsets—the pure birth and pure death models—have a long
history of use for informing thinking about macroevolutionary patterns. Here we illustrate with
examples the wide range of questions they have been used to address, including estimating
and comparing rates of diversification of clades, investigating the “shapes” of clades, and
some rather surprising uses such as estimating speciation rates from data that are not
resolved below the level of the genus. The raw data for inference can be the fossil record or …