Assessing the impact of character evolution models on phylogenetic and macroevolutionary inferences from fossil data

Understanding the evolution and phylogenetic distribution of morphologic traits is fundamental to macroevolutionary research. Despite decades of major advances and key insights from molecular systematics, organismal anatomical features remain a key source of biological data for both inferring phylogenies and investigating patterns of trait evolution among fossil and extant species. In palaeobiology, morphologic characters are typically the only source of information available for reconstructing evolutionary trees. Systematists working with fossil data must make decisions regarding how morphological characters are modeled, whether they are coded as continuous or categorical, and how to address biological sources of rate variation. To determine the impact of how different models of morphological evolution influence phylogenetic inferences and downstream comparative analyses of fossil data, we competed a series of increasingly complex model configurations of character evolution to a datase..., , # Data from: Assessing the impact of character evolution models on phylogenetic and macroevolutionary inferences from fossil data

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.ksn02v7gf](10.5061/dryad.ksn02v7gf)

## Description of the data and file structure

Data comprise nexus files for morphologic character data from Monti and Confalonieri (2019) partitioned by character state and into ecologic vs. non-ecologic traits. Results of phylogenetic analyses are saved as .trees and .tre files, including the posterior sample and maximum clade credibility trees. R scripts are included to generate treespaces from the results.

References:

Monti, D.S. and Confalonieri, V.A., 2019. First cladistic analysis of the trilobite family Olenidae from the Furongian and Ordovician. *Lethaia*, *52*(3), pp.304-322.

## Code/software

Data files can be viewed in a standard text editor. A custom R script includes functions for generating tree space visualizations. Any pdf viewer can be used to open *Wright_and_Hopkins__Sup...,