Fig. 3

Divergence time estimates of whales (Cetacea). The tree was constructed using the topology presented in Fig. 1, five calibration points (Additional file 1: Table S3 [40,41,42,43,44]), and amino acid sequences of 562 single-copy orthologous sequences. According to this estimate, baleen whales originated at 24.2 Mya, the pygmy right whale diverged around 21.4 Mya, and rorquals around 18.5 Mya, although the error bars indicate large ranges for all three cases