Body mass is one of the most important determinants of animal ecology. Unlike other important traits it is also readily inferable from fossils and it is therefore one of the only traits that can be directly analysed and compared between fossil and contemporary communities. Despite this, no comprehensive database of the body mass of larger clades of extinct species exists. Analysis of fossils has therefore been restricted to small clades or to smaller, potentially biased, subsets of species. We here describe CarniFoss, an open-access database of body masses of all 1,322 extinct species of non-pinniped Carnivoramorpha and two related extinct groups of carnivorous mammals, Hyaenodonta and Oxyaenidae.

中文翻译：

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CarniFOSS：化石食肉动物体重的数据库

体重是动物生态学最重要的决定因素之一。与其他重要特征不同，它也很容易从化石中推断出来，因此它是唯一可以在化石和当代社区之间直接分析和比较的特征之一。尽管如此，还没有关于较大的灭绝物种进化枝的体重的综合数据库。因此，对化石的分析仅限于小型进化枝或较小的、可能有偏见的物种子集。我们在这里描述了 CarniFoss，这是一个开放存取的数据库，包含所有 1,322 种已灭绝的非鳍足食肉目物种和两个相关的已灭绝食肉哺乳动物群体，鬣齿兽科和 Oxyaenidae。