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Supplementary Material 1

Fossil remains from the latest Messinian of Casino Basin (Tuscany, Italy) are known since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Among the others, the mammal assemblage includes Mesopithecus pentelicus, Tapirus arvernensis, Propotamochoerus provincialis and scarce and poorly preserved remains of a hippopotamid, consisting of a mandibular symphysis fragment, an apical fragment of a lower canine, some isolated lower incisors, a fragmented second upper premolar and a second lower molar. These specimens were initially referred as Hippopotamus hipponensis and later ascribed to the new species Hippopotamus pantanellii (recently reported as Hexaprotodon? pantanellii). However, this attribution has been disputed during the past years. The hippopotamid remains from the Casino Basin are revised here in order to clarify their systematic position and to infer paleobiogeographic and evolutionary patterns within the Mediterranean fossil record of Hippopotamidae. The morphology of the remains collected from the Casino Basin more closely resembles the African than the Asian hippopotamids’ lineage and therefore the Tuscan remains should be more properly referred as Archaeopotamus pantanellii. The latter species probably dispersed into Tuscany from the Iberian Peninsula where the presence of Archaeopotamus crusafonti is well documented.

Bryozoans are colonial animals that are widely distributed in marine benthic environments and play an important role in temperate and cold-water oceanic shelves as habitat providers. They are one of the most diverse components of intertidal and shelf environment communities. Morphologically and mineralogically diverse, bryozoans are important carbonate producers with an extensive fossil record, which makes them good indicators in environmental and paleoenvironmental research. They are helpful to address evolutionary questions, especially those dealing with the effects of climatic change on assemblages of benthic animals. Existing data, though insufficient, suggests that bryozoans can become a valuable tool in investigating present-day climate change. This project gives the opportunity to reinforce the (1) bryozoan proxy tool in climate research and it will be additionally (2) a basic resource for bryozoan identification through museum collections. This Project aims to record, on a worldwide map with SEM photographs, all the Quaternary and Mediterranean and North Atlantic Recent bryozoan taxa kept in museums which are participants of the Synthesys Scheme in order to help with bryozoan taxonomic identification. For this, all the specimens are georeferenced and a type specimen or the best specimen of each species has been scanned under scanning electron microscope (SEM). This information is displayed through the own museums’ websites with links to their associated partners on this project (see below participants) and the GBIF Website as well. This project contributes with more than 50 bryozoan taxa not recorded on any Website. It is 3.4% of the current identified taxa from Quaternary and Mediterranean and North Atlantic recent bryozoan taxa. Although there is already a website (https://www.bryozoa.net/) on recent bryozoan taxa, it includes SEM images of only few taxa and none are georeferenced. This is the first time that Quaternary and Recent bryozoan taxa are georeferenced on a world map and images of the different taxa are displayed. For this, some of the best world museum collections have been used. Institutions involved: NHM, Natural History Museum, London; MNHN, Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris; MNCN, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Madrid; NHMW, Naturhistorisches Museum, Wien; Naturkunde: Museum fur Naturkunde, Berlin; NNHC-HUJI, The National Natural History Collections, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It will be an important tool for species identification as the NHM-London keeps at least 215 type specimens (recent), the MNCN 219 type specimens, the MNHN 210 types, NHMW 3 recent syntype series and 3 fossil syntype lots types and Naturkunde fewer than 125 types. Most of them are not available on any other website or repository (only Naturkunde has some of them on GBIF Website, but without SEM images associated). All of the extant specimens are from Mediterranean and North Atlantic and the fossils are worldwide. The MNCN keeps at least 5157 Quaternary and Recent bryozoan colonies to date. There are at least 395 species. Of these, 81 are holotypes and 211 paratypes belonging to 59 species. There are not less than 24% of the colonies published (1235) in 28 publications. This site displays the diversity of Quaternary and Recent bryozoans kept in the MNCN (Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, National Museum of Natural Sciences of Madrid). It has been created thanks to Synthesys Virtual Access (VA) Call 2, 2021, for the international project Bryozoa Identification Tool (BIT) for Quaternary and Recent Mediterranean and North Atlantic Bryozoans. There are SEM images of the most represenative individuals and the dataset for Unix/Linus and Windows. Funded by Synthesys Virtual Access Call 2021, for the international project Bryozoa Identification Tool (BIT) for Quaternary and Recent Mediterranean and North Atlantic Bryozoans.https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Peer reviewed

Standards with LtC alignments

Data-collection Specimens. We analysed 1090 skeletons of wild-born primates belonging to 60 species of ten families (Table 1). These skeletons are held in collections of ten European and American natural history museums (Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden (Naturalis); The Natural History Museum, London (NHMUK); the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren (RMCA); the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Brussels (RBINS); the Natural History Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen (ZMUC); Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna (NHMW); the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm (NRM); Museum fur Naturkunde, Berlin (MfN); and the National Museum for Natural History, Paris (MNHN), Natural History Museum Oslo, American Museum of Natural History, New York, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago (FMNH). Five families belonged to the Strepsirrhini (Lorisidae, Galagidae, Daubentoniidae, Lemuridae, Indriidae) and five to the Haplorrhini, of which two Platyrrhini (Cebidae, Atelidae) and three Catarrhini (Cercopithecidae, Hylobatidae, Hominidae). Cervical vertebrae and transitional cervicothoracic vertebrae. We determined the number of cervical vertebrae and transitional cervicothoracic vertebrae (vertebrae with both cervical and thoracic characteristics, i.e. a seventh vertebrae with a rudimentary rib or one full rib instead of two, or an eighth vertebrae with rudimentary ribs or without ribs on one side). The identification of transitional cervicothoracic vertebrae was based on the presence of cervical or rudimentary first ribs. In the case of a fusion of rudimentary cervical ribs with the transverse process (apophysomegaly), the vertebra was counted as a transitional cervicothoracic vertebra when the transverse process was at least 15% longer than that of the first thoracic vertebra, or when traces of the articulation were still visible. Explanatory variables. Per specimen where we determined the vertebral pattern, we recorded the species, life style ("fast" vs. "slow"), individual age class and sex and whether the animal was kept in a zoo later in life or not. This last indicator variable can accommodate effects of relaxed selection in captive environments on the probability of finding an abnormal pattern. Phylogeny. We used the consensus phylogeny of primates provided by the 10k Trees Project (Arnold & Nunn, 2010) to represent our data per species graphically and to calculate correlations between species effects Statistical analysis. The R script with our analysis is added.

A summary of the classes in the Latimer Core standard.

Taxa used in this study

Advancing the Catalogue of the World's Natural History Collections - Consultation Materials

Supplementary data file S3