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..., Appendix 1 contains the produced phylogeny of all carnivores. Appendix 2 contains all the R codes for the analyses. Appendix 3 contains a description of our treatment of all the individual fossil records. Appendix 4 shows topological variation across trees plotted as 18 separate subtrees focusing on smaller clades. Appendix 5 contains morphological character coding for the newly coded taxa and the MrBayes input files, , # Data for: Reliable biogeography requires fossils: Insights from a new species-level phylogeny of extinct and living carnivores

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.76hdr7t48](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.76hdr7t48)

Appendix 1 contains the produced phylogeny of all carnivores.
Appendix 2 contains all the R codes for the analyses.
Appendix 3 contains a description of our treatment of all the individual fossil records.
Appendix 4 shows topological variation across trees plotted as 18 separate subtrees focusing on smaller clades.
Appendix 5 contains morphological character coding for the newly coded taxa and the MrBayes input files

## Description of the data and file structure

Appendix 1 is the resulting phylogeny
Appendix 2 contains commented R codes for all analyses published in the paper. The total script is divided into 18 separate files with titles describing the overall theme of each script file. To fully replicate all analyses in the paper the scripts needs to be run in order based ...