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The phylogenetic relationships of 46 echinoids, with representatives from 13 of the 14 ordinal-level clades and about 70% of extant families commonly recognized, have been established from 3 genes (3,226 alignable bases) and 119 morphological characters. Morphological and molecular estimates are similar enough to be considered suboptimal estimates of one another, and the combined data provide a tree that, when calibrated against the fossil record, provides paleontological estimates of divergence times and completeness of their fossil record. The order of branching on the cladogram largely agrees with the stratigraphic order of first occurrences and implies that their fossil record is more than 85% complete at family level and at a resolution of 5-Myr time intervals.

Molecular estimates of divergence times derived from applying both molecular clock and relaxed molecular clock models are …