Data from: Cenozoic climate change and the evolution of North American mammalian predator ecomorphology

The trend of global cooling across the Cenozoic transformed the North
American landscape from closed forest to more open grasslands, resulting
in dietary adaptations in herbivores in response to shifting resources. In
contrast, the material properties of the predator food source, muscle,
skin, and bone, have remained constant over this transition, suggesting a
corresponding lack of change in predator dietary adaptations. We
investigate the North American mammal predator fossil record using a tooth
shape metric and body mass, predicting that the former would exhibit
stability. Instead, we found that mean molar morphology became more
blade-like, with our tooth shape metric sharply increasing in the late
Eocene and remaining high from the Oligocene onward. Subsequent tests in
extant carnivorans reveal taxa with more blade-like teeth are prevalent in
more open environments. Our results reveal an unexpected functional shift
among North American predators in response to large-scale environmental
changes across the Cenozoic.