Osteometric Data of Avian Fauna of Armenia

The data article provides a description of the dataset of the linked repository which contains osteometric measurement data of modern bird skeletons deposited in the scientific collections of the Laboratory of Vertebrate Zoology the Institute of Zoology at the Scientific Center of Zoology and Hydroecology of NAS Armenia. The center’s avian skeleton collection includes 165 specimens and is the largest avian osteology collection in Armenia. The information outlined in the database is not part of any published research article and is made available as a standalone data repository for scientists dealing with morphometric comparative studies of birds.
The linked Mendeley Data repository dataset contains an Excel file named ‘bird osteometrics’ with cranial and postcranial measurement data of modern bird specimens sampled over the period of 60 years (between 1961 and 2022). The featured measurement data is from 141 studied bird individuals which belong to 81 species, 34 families and 17 orders collected from 141 sampling points across all provinces of Armenia. Of these 141 individuals, 16 are female and 125 are male individuals.
The taxonomic list of birds for which the osteometric measurements is provided contain the number of individuals measured and geographic names of sampling locations. Because no geo-positioning technology was available in the early stages of material collection, names of the nearest settlements are used to describe the location of the sampling point.
The taxonomy and nomenclature used in Table 3 follow the Bird Life International Illustrated Checklist of the Birds of the World [5, 6] and is based on the taxonomy published in the Handbook of the Birds of the World (HBW) [1].
Also included in the linked dataset are four image files in .Tiff format named ‘Map1.tiff’, ‘Map2.tiff’, ‘Map3.tiff’ and ‘Map4.tiff’ showing sampling locations of bird specimens at which the material has been obtained. The original images have a resolution of 300 dpi, with a width of 1500 pixels and a height of 1412 pixels.