Adding geological timescales to phylogenies

coord_geo() is also designed to work smoothly with phylogenies that are plotted with the ggtree package. First let’s load some important packages.

# Load deeptime
library(deeptime)
# Load other packages
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
# Load ggtree
library(ggtree)
# Load phytools for some example data
library(phytools)
data(mammal.tree)
# Load paleotree for some example fossil data
library(paleotree)
data(RaiaCopesRule)

Timescales and phylogenies

Now, let’s plot some phylogenies with timescales! Note that by default the time axis increases toward the tips for trees plotted with ggtree(), so you must use the revts() function from ggtree to change the x-axis values to increasing negative values. Note that once you’ve done this, you will need to set neg = TRUE in coord_geo(). Furthermore, any time axis limits that you set will need to be negative. Here we also use the scale_x_continuous() function to relabel the negative x-axis values with positive labels.

p <- ggtree(mammal.tree) +
  coord_geo(xlim = c(-75, 0), ylim = c(-2, Ntip(mammal.tree)), neg = TRUE, abbrv = FALSE) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(-80, 0, 20), labels = abs(seq(-80, 0, 20))) +
  theme_tree2()
revts(p)

Phylogenies with only fossil taxa

Many phylogenies only have fossil taxa in them (i.e., non-ultrametric). These can be handled by coord_geo() by using position_nudge() function. In most cases, you will want to nudge the time axis values (in this case, the x-axis) by the root.time of your phylogeny. Also, note that we have modified plot.margin here to accommodate the stacked timescale.

ggtree(ceratopsianTreeRaia, position = position_nudge(x = -ceratopsianTreeRaia$root.time)) +
  coord_geo(
    xlim = c(-163.5, -66), ylim = c(-2, Ntip(ceratopsianTreeRaia)),
    pos = list("bottom", "bottom"), skip = c("Paleocene", "Middle Jurassic"),
    dat = list("epochs", "periods"), abbrv = FALSE,
    size = list(4, 5), neg = TRUE, center_end_labels = TRUE
  ) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = -rev(epochs$max_age), labels = rev(epochs$max_age)) +
  theme_tree2() +
  theme(plot.margin = margin(7, 11, 7, 11))

Circular phylogenies

Phylogenies can be plotted in a circular layout with a timescale background using the coord_geo_radial() function. It works just like coord_geo() and has many of the same arguments. Note that coord_geo_radial() only works with ggplot2 version 3.5.0 and higher. For other versions of ggplot2, you can use coord_geo_polar().

revts(ggtree(mammal.tree)) +
  coord_geo_radial(dat = "stages") +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(-60, 0, 20), labels = abs(seq(-60, 0, 20))) +
  scale_y_continuous(guide = NULL) +
  theme_classic()

plot of phylogeny with a timescale in the background

Circular phylogenies with “stacked” timescales

Timescales can even be “stacked” like with coord_geo(), although the stacking occurs in a circular fashion. In this case, we use scale_y_continuous() to add a small expansion to the y-axis (which is now the theta axis) so the numbers don’t overlap with the phylogeny. We also use the prop, start, end, and direction arguments to specify how the different timescales are oriented and split within the polar space.

revts(ggtree(mammal.tree)) +
  coord_geo_radial(
    dat = list("stages", "periods"), alpha = .5, lty = "dashed",
    prop = list(0.66, .34), start = 2 * pi, end = 1.75 * pi, direction = 1,
  ) +
  scale_y_continuous(guide = NULL, expand = expansion(mult = c(0.02, 0.02))) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(-60, 0, 20), labels = abs(seq(-60, 0, 20))) +
  theme_classic()

plot of phylogeny with stacked timescales in the background

Disclaimer

Note that coord_geo_radial() has been tested with the plotting of ultrametric and non-ultrametric phylogenies with ggtree::ggtree(), but it may have unexpected behavior when combined with other functions from ggtree. Furthermore, coord_geo_radial() may be useful (albeit perhaps abstract) for plotting other types of data, but this has not been investigated.