Data and code from: Morphological evolution in island birds is associated with more terrestrial lifestyles and a lower number of raptors and intra-family competitors

Island biotas experience unique ecological conditions, such as isolation, small areas, or simplified communities that promote repeated patterns of evolution, like changes in body size, that have been widely studied. By contrast, apart from the evolution of flightlessness in birds, changes in body shape remain relatively less explored. Here, we explore the effect of insularity on the evolution of locomotion-related traits. We used 796 pairs of endemic island birds and their closest mainland relatives (1170 species total) to explore the effect of insularity on the evolution of locomotion-related traits, specifically wing shape and length, and tarsus length. Furthermore, we assessed the effect of the number of raptors and intra-family competitors (as the co-occurring species belonging to the same family) on these patterns. We found that endemic island birds evolved features adapted to a more terrestrial mode of locomotion, characterised by rounder wings and longer tarsi compared to their m..., , # Dryad dataset

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.1zcrjdg57](10.5061/dryad.1zcrjdg57)

## Description of the data and file structure

**trees_ex.nex** file contains 100 alternative Ericson tree topologies obtained from Jetz et al. 2012 after adding extinct species with AVOTREX function.

**morpho_db.csv** file contains all the species with morphological data used in the analyses.

**morpho_db_filtered.csv** file contains only pairs with non-repeated mainland species

See below for further description:

### Files and variables

**trees_ex.nex** file contains 100 alternative Ericson tree topologies obtained from Jetz et al. 2012 after adding extinct species with AVOTREX function.

**morpho_db.csv** and **morpho_db_filtered.csv** file contains all the morphological data used in the analyses. See below for further description:

NEW2_sequence: unique number for each species. Repeated mainland species have a different number in each pair

pairID: number of the pair

Museum: museum where the morpho...,