Data from: Independent evolution of baleen whale gigantism linked to Plio-Pleistocene ocean dynamics ...
Vertebrates have evolved to gigantic sizes repeatedly over the past 250 Myr, reaching their extreme in today's baleen whales (Mysticeti). Hypotheses for the evolution of exceptionally large size in mysticetes range from niche partitioning to predator avoidance, but there has been no quantitativ...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Dataset |
| Language: | English |
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Dryad
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.b68g0 https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.b68g0 |
| Summary: | Vertebrates have evolved to gigantic sizes repeatedly over the past 250 Myr, reaching their extreme in today's baleen whales (Mysticeti). Hypotheses for the evolution of exceptionally large size in mysticetes range from niche partitioning to predator avoidance, but there has been no quantitative examination of body size evolutionary dynamics in this clade and it remains unclear when, why or how gigantism evolved. By fitting phylogenetic macroevolutionary models to a dataset consisting of living and extinct species, we show that mysticetes underwent a clade-wide shift in their mode of body size evolution during the Plio-Pleistocene. This transition, from Brownian motion-like dynamics to a trended random walk towards larger size, is temporally linked to the onset of seasonally intensified upwelling along coastal ecosystems. High prey densities resulting from wind-driven upwelling, rather than abundant resources alone, are the primary determinant of efficient foraging in extant mysticetes and Late Pliocene ... : Mysticete maximum clade credibility treeTime calibrated maximum clade credibility tree of fossil and extant mysticetesslater_mcct.tremysticete body lengthsBody length data for fossil and extant mysticetesslater_length_data.csv2008CompilationDatadelta^18O data from Zachos et al. used to produce proxy temperature curveBEAST 2 xml file used to infer phylogeny of mysticetes under FBD model from morphological and molecular dataslater_mysticete_morph_mol.xmlSizeEvolutionAnalysesR script to perform macroevolutionary analyses (requires functions script)slater_bodySizeEvolutionAnalyses.RfunctionsFunctions required to perform macroevolutionary analysesslater_functions.Rsimulation_testsScript to perform simulations examining model performance (trend shift model) and sampling biasslater_simulation_tests.R ... |
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