Data from: Macroevolutionary consequences of profound climate change on niche evolution in marine mollusks over the past three million years

In order to predict the fate of biodiversity in a rapidly changing world, we must first understand how species adapt to new environmental conditions. The long-term evolutionary dynamics of species’ physiological tolerances to differing climatic regimes remains obscure. Here, we unite palaeontological and neontological data to analyse whether species’ environmental tolerances remain stable across three million years of profound climatic changes using ten phylogenetically, ecologically, and developmentally diverse mollusc species from the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains, USA. We additionally investigate whether these species’ upper and lower thermal tolerances are constrained across this interval. We find that these species’ environmental preferences are stable across the duration of their lifetimes, even when faced with significant environmental perturbations. The results suggest that species will respond to current and future warming by altering distributions to track suitable habitat, or, if the pace of change is too rapid, by going extinct. Our findings also support methods that project species’ present-day environmental requirements to future climatic landscapes to assess conservation risks.