Supplementary files for: Why should we compare morphological and molecular disparity?

1. Indices of morphological disparity seek to summarise the highly multivariate morphological variation across groups of species within clades, time bins or other groups. Morphological variation can be quantified using geometric morphometric, outline or surface-based methods. These are most effective when morphological differences are relatively modest and there are numerous ubiquitous landmarks and phase-aligned features of shape variation. The most disparate samples, such as those across classes and phyla, typically necessitate the use of discrete characters. Unfortunately, such characters are often compiled subjectively in a manner reflecting the level of morphological and taxonomic focus and the intensity of taxon sampling.
2. Sampling intensity is often highly variable within a single data set, especially in repurposed and amalgamated cladistic matrices. Here we propose indices of molecular disparity analogous to those of morphological disparity. Molecular sequence data can be obt..., This dataset was collated from 16 published total evidence datasets. Hereby we supply the molecular and morphological character data for each dataset as well as the associated phylogeny and GTR distance file in CSV format., Discrete character and DNA alignment files can be opened with Mesquite (nexus format) or with the R packages Claddis and Ape.