FishShapes v1: functionally relevant measurements of teleost shape and size on three dimensions

Teleost fishes account for 96% of all fish species and exhibit a
spectacular variety of body forms. Teleost lineages range from deep-bodied
to elongate (e.g. eels, needlefish), laterally compressed (e.g.
ribbonfish) to globular (e.g. pufferfish) and include uniquely shaped
lineages such as seahorses, flatfishes and ocean sunfishes. Adaptive body
shape convergence within fishes has long been hypothesized but the nature
of the relationships between fish form and ecological and environmental
variables remain largely unknown at the macroevolutionary scale. To
facilitate the investigation of the interacting factors influencing
teleost body shape evolution we measured 8 functionally relevant linear
traits on adult-sized specimens along with specimen mass. Linear
measurements of standard length, maximum body depth, maximum fish width,
lower jaw length, mouth width, head depth, minimum caudal peduncle depth
and minimum caudal peduncle width were taken in millimeters with calipers,
or tape measures for oversized specimens. We measured these traits on a
total of 16523 specimens (1-3 specimens per species) at the Smithsonian
National Museum of Natural History and took approximately 7000 person
hours of data collection to complete. The data went through a three-step
error-checking process to clean and validate the data and then species
averages were calculated. We present the complete specimen dataset, which
encompasses approximately one fifth of extant teleost species diversity,
spanning ~90% of teleost families and ~96% of orders. The species and
family names are compatible with the FishBase taxonomy (Pauly &
Froese, 2019) and the order information with the phylogenetically informed
taxonomy of Betancur-R et al. (2014). This dataset is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution - Non-Commercial 4.0 International License
(CC BY-NC), please cite this paper when using the data or a subset of it.