CarniFOSS: A database of the body mass of fossil carnivores

Motivation: Body mass is one of the most important determinants of animal
ecology. Unlike other important traits it is also readily inferable from
fossils and it is therefore one of the only traits that can be directly
analyzed and compared between fossil and contemporary communities. Despite
this, no comprehensive database of the body mass of larger clades of
extinct species exists. Analysis of fossils has therefore been restricted
to small clades or to smaller, potentially biased, subsets of species. We
here describe CarniFoss, an open-access database of body masses of all
1322 extinct species of non-pinniped Carnivoramorpha and two related
extinct groups of carnivorous mammals, Hyaenodonta, and Oxyaenida. Main
types of variables contained: We gathered lengths of teeth of fossil and
extant species and body mass for extant species and a few of the
best-known fossil species. Following this we estimated body mass for all
species through phylogenetic imputation. Spatial location and grain:
Global, terrestrial Time period and grain: We collected data on all known
species within the focal groups. The known species all lived in the
Paleogene, Neogene or Quaternary (i.e. the last 66 Mya). Major taxa and
level of measurement: We searched for data on reported tooth size of all
described species of Carnivoramorpha (excluding pinnipeds) and selected
extinct related groups (Hyaenodonta and Oxyaenidae). We combined this with
measured body mass for all extant species and inferred body mass based on
long-bones for selected extinct species, as well as a species-level
phylogeny including all extant and extinct species in the group, and
inferred the body mass for all species using phylogenetic imputation.
Software format: Data is provided as a series of .csv files, with all
metadata in a separate PDF file.