Data from: Lineage diversity and size disparity in Musteloidea: testing patterns of adaptive radiation using molecular and fossil-based methods

Adaptive radiation is hypothesized to be a primary mechanism that drives
the remarkable species diversity and morphological disparity across the
Tree of Life. Tests for adaptive radiation in extant taxa are
traditionally estimated from calibrated molecular phylogenies with little
input from extinct taxa. With 85 putative species in 33 genera and over
400 described extinct species, the carnivoran superfamily Musteloidea is a
prime candidate to investigate patterns of adaptive radiation using both
extant- and fossil-based macroevolutionary methods. The species diversity
and equally impressive ecological and phenotypic diversity found across
Musteloidea is often attributed to 2 adaptive radiations coinciding with 2
major climate events, the Eocene-Oligocene transition and the Mid-Miocene
Climate Transition. Here, we compiled a novel time-scaled phylogeny for
88% of extant musteloids and used it as a framework for testing the
predictions of adaptive radiation hypotheses with respect to rates of
lineage diversification and phenotypic evolution. Contrary to
expectations, we found no evidence for rapid bursts of lineage
diversification at the origin of Musteloidea, and further analyses of
lineage diversification rates using molecular and fossil-based methods did
not find associations between rates of lineage diversification and the
Eocene-Oligocene transition or Mid-Miocene Climate Transition as
previously hypothesized. Rather, we found support for decoupled
diversification dynamics driven by increased clade carrying capacity in
the branches leading to a subclade of elongate mustelids. Supporting
decoupled diversification dynamics between the subclade of elongate
mustelids and the ancestral musteloid regime is our finding of increased
rates of body length evolution, but not body mass evolution, within the
decoupled mustelid subclade. The lack of correspondence in rates of body
mass and length evolution suggest that phenotypic evolutionary rates under
a single morphological metric, even one as influential as mass, may not
capture the evolution of diversity in clades that exhibit elongate body
shapes. The discordance in evolutionary rates between body length and body
mass along with evidence of decoupled diversification dynamics suggests
that body elongation might be an innovation for the exploitation of novel
Mid-Miocene resources, resulting in the radiation of some musteloids.