  As genomic scale datasets motivate research on species tree inference,
simulators of the multispecies coalescent (MSC) process are essential for the
testing and evaluation of new inference methods. However, the simulators
themselves must be tested to ensure they give valid samples from the coalescent
process. In this work we develop several statistical tools using summary
statistics to evaluate the fit of a simulated gene tree sample to the MSC
model. Using these tests on samples from four published simulators, we uncover
flaws in several. The tests are implemented as an R package, so that both
developers and users will be able to easily check proper performance of future
simulators.

Populations and Evolution