Data for: Reliable biogeography requires fossils: Insights from a new species-level phylogeny of extinct and living carnivores

A central objective of historical biogeography is to understand where
clades originated and how they moved across space and over time. However,
given the dynamic history of ecosystem changes in response to climate
change and geologic events, the manifold long-distance dispersals over
evolutionary timescales, and regional and global extinctions, it remains
uncertain how reliable inferences based solely on extant taxa can be
achieved. Using a novel species-level phylogeny of all known extant and
extinct species of the mammalian order Carnivora and related extinct
groups, we show that far more precise and accurate  ancestral
areas can be estimated by fully integrating extinct species into the
analyses, rather than solely relying on extant species or identifying
ancestral areas only based on the geography of the oldest fossils. Through
a series of simulations, we further show that this conclusion is robust
under realistic scenarios in which the unknown extinct taxa represent a
biased subset of all extinct species. Our results highlight the importance
of integrating fossil taxa into a phylogenetic framework to further
improve our understanding of historical biogeography and reveal the
dynamic dispersal and diversification history of carnivores.