Data from: Extant-only comparative methods fail to recover the disparity preserved in the bird fossil record

Most extant species are in clades with poor fossil records, and recent
studies of comparative methods show have low power to infer even highly
simplified models of trait evolution without fossil data. Birds are a
well-studied radiation, yet their early evolutionary patterns are still
contentious. The fossil record suggests that birds underwent a rapid
ecological radiation after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, and several
smaller, subsequent radiations. This hypothesized series of repeated
radiations from fossil data is difficult to test using extant data alone.
By uniting morphological and phylogenetic data on 604 extant genera of
birds with morphological data on 58 species of extinct birds from 50
million years ago, the “halfway point” of avian evolution, I have been
able to test how well extant-only methods predict the diversity of fossil
forms . All extant-only methods underestimate the disparity, although the
ratio of within to between clade disparity does suggest high early rates.
The failure of standard models to predict high early disparity suggests
that recent radiations are obscuring deep time patterns in the evolution
of birds. Metrics from different models can be used in conjunction to
provide more valuable insights than simply finding the model with the
highest relative fit.