Histomorphometric measurements of cortical bone in extant and Pleistocene rhinoceroses

This dataset contains 5,174 verified raw measurements of the minimum visible diameter of secondary osteons obtained from undecalcified cortical bone sections of 19 rhinoceros bones representing five extant and Pleistocene species: Coelodonta antiquitatis, Stephanorhinus kirchbergensis, Ceratotherium simum, Diceros bicornis, and Rhinoceros unicornis. The dataset includes taxonomic, anatomical, temporal, and ecological classifications, together with bone identifiers and coding used in the statistical analyses. Multiple osteons were measured within each bone. Three sampled bones of S. kirchbergensis (r10, r15, and r19) derive from the same individual from Gorzów Wielkopolski. The complete dataset contains 5,174 measurements from 19 bones. The variable MAIN_MODEL identifies the subset of 4,907 measurements from 18 limb bones used in the main mixed-effects analyses; rib r16 was retained in the complete dataset but excluded from the main inferential models because its cortical structure reflects a different functional loading regime from that of locomotor limb bones. The dataset accompanies a study of interspecific, temporal, and habitat-associated variation in rhinoceros cortical bone histomorphometry.