Mammalian fossil occurrence and paleobotanical climate data for the Neogene in North America and Europe

The uploaded files cover two datasets. The first dataset provides Northern-hemisphere mammalian fossil data for the Miocene and Pliocene epochs (23-1.8 million years ago), for large terrestrial mammals of the orders Artiodactyla, Carnivora, Perissodactyla, Primates and Proboscidea. The second dataset provides regional terrestrial climate data and data on net primary production of biomass, derived from fossil plant communities for the same period and region. Both datasets are compilations we combined and unified from several public sources, and provide as comprehensive a fossil record for the time period and region as possible from the state of the literature. We combined these two datasets to provide a comprehensive quantitative test of the diversity-productivity relationship for terrestrial large mammals through time across broad temporal and spatial scales. In the publication for which the datasets were used, we show a significant positive diversity-productivity relationship through the 20-million-year record, providing evidence on unprecedented spatial and temporal scales that this relationship is a general pattern in the ecology and paleo-ecology of our planet. Further, we discover that genus richness today does not match the fossil relationship, suggesting that a combination of human impacts and Pleistocene climate variability has modified the 20-million-year ecological relationship by strongly reducing primary productivity and driving many mammalian species into decline or to extinction. The upload includes R scripts of our analyses. The original paper with which this dataset was published is here: www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1602145113 .