The text file contains the original data used in the phylogenetic analyses of Wang et al. (2017: Scientific Reports 7:45387). The text file is marked up according to the standard NEXUS format commonly used by various phylogenetic analysis software packages. The file will be parsed automatically by a variety of programs that recognize NEXUS as a standard bioinformatics file format. The first six lines of the file identify the file as NEXUS, indicate that the file contains data for 81 taxa (species) and 2905 characters, indicate that the first 2805 characters are DNA sequence and the last 100 are morphological, that the data may be interleaved (with data for one species on multiple rows), that gaps inserted into the DNA sequence alignment are indicated by a dash, and that missing data are indicated by a question mark. The file contains aligned nucleotide sequence data for 5 gene regions and 100 morphological characters. The identity and positions of data partitions are indicated in the mrbayes block of commands for the phylogenetic program MrBayes at the end of the file. The mrbayes block also contains instructions for MrBayes on various non-default settings for that program. These are explained in the original publication. Descriptions of the morphological characters and more details on the species and specimens included in the dataset are provided in the supplementary document included as a separate pdf. The original raw DNA sequence data are available from NCBI GenBank under the accession numbers indicated in the supplementary file.