African countries including Chad, Niger, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Benin, Sierra Leone, Mali, Mauritania, Guinea, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso [39] . Figure 6A illustrates the location-annotated MCC phylogeny and demographic history for the African dog rabies lineages. We make this initial inference without either BSSVS or a distanceinformed prior. To allow for variation in the underlying coalescent process giving rise to the phylogeny, we assume a piece-wise constant multiple change-point model on the effective populationsize with 20 coalecent-interval groups [25] . As generally observed for rabies viruses [28] , there exists strong signal of phylogenetic clustering according to sampling location. This observation is also These two locations are geographically distant from each other, but they both host viruses from the most basal lineage in the phylogeny ( Figure 6A ). Root inference is somewhat different using BSSVS and a distance-informed prior on the rates ( Figure 6B ). In this case, a more central location, Niger, obtains the highest posterior probability (0.144) but the KL divergence for the root state reconstruction is only marginally greater than zero (0.0645). The exploitation of BSSVS contributes to this effect; as for Avian influenza A-H5N1, distance-informed priors, alone, on the rates have little impact (data not shown).