Readme for this Dryad package Contact: Gene Hunt These files are related to the forthcoming article by Gene Hunt, Melanie Hopkins and Scott Lidgard, "Simple versus complex models of trait evolution in fossil lineages and the emergence of stasis from adaptive responses to environmental change," accepted for publication in the Procceding of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. This data package includes the raw trait data sufficient to re-run the analyses from this paper. Important note: The analyses presented in the above paper filtered these data to only analyze those time-series with seven or more samples (n = 709). For the sake of completeness, we also include here the examples we compiled that had only six samples (total n = 771). Included files: "paleoTS files.zip" Zip archive of 771 text files with the raw data of morphological time -series from fossil lineages. Each file has four columns, from left to right: sample size, trait means, trait variances, and sample ages. Rows represent samples, from oldest to youngest. These files can be read without modifaction by the function read.paleoTS() in the R package {paleoTS}. "paleoTS files.RData" Same data as previous, but all combined into a single file readable by R. Double-clinking this file will open R and make available in the R Workspace an object called 'tsList' which is a list of the 771 time-series (paleoTS) objects. "paleoTS summary.xlsx" Excel spreadsheet with auxiliary data for these files, including the number of samples, environmental context, and taxonomic group of the fossils. Includes also reference information for the published papers from which these data were drawn. "paleoTS summary.csv" Auxiliary data as in the previous, in comma-separated format. "paleoTS references.csv" Information on the full references taken from "paleoTS summary.xlsx"