Maximum recorded size of recent and fossil brachiopods

Changes in predator-prey interactions are often implicated as drivers of major evolutionary change. A prominent example is the dramatic changes in shallow marine assemblages during the Mesozoic Marine Revolution (MMR) when major clades, including rhynchonelliform brachiopods, became restricted and less diverse. Currently, shallow water temperate and polar brachiopods can be large, but in the tropics, they are all small. By contrast, we demonstrate that throughout the Jurassic large brachiopods occurred in shallow sites, from polar to tropical latitudes, but are absent in later periods from tropical areas. These changes occurred in parallel in both major orders (Rhynchonellida and Terebratulida) and also independently within the two sub-ordinal lineages within the Terebratulida (terebratulinids and terebratellinids). Increases in both grazing and predation pressures associated with the MMR might account for this pattern. However, we note that many current environments support both large ..., We collected data on the maximum size attained by modern brachiopod taxa. This database of 442 terebratulide and 58 rhynchonellide taxa was assembled from published accounts (70 papers and monographs) and direct measurements made from museum samples (including a large set from the wet collections of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History (Washington D.C., USA), the Naturhistoriska riksmuseet (Stockholm, Sweden) and our field collections. The following were recorded: taxon (making no attempt to revise the generic or specific systematics), longitude and latitude of collection site, depth of collection, and length of the ventral valve of the largest individual encountered (in mm). For trawl data, we used the minimum depth recorded. Taxonomic coverage of the database is good with 95% of extant genera of both terebratulides and rhynchonellides captured and including c.90% of the type species. Our database was then filtered by depth to capture sub-samples representing ..., , # Maximum recorded size of recent and fossil brachiopods

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.kprr4xhb7](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.kprr4xhb7)

These data were collected either from the literature or field/museum specimens. There are two sheets - one recording the maximum length shown by any species at a specific modern site, the second recording the maximum length of the largest recorded species of either a terebratulide or rhynchonellide brachiopod from fossil sites.

## Description of the data and file structure

The data are arranged in two worksheets. Supplementary Information 1 refers to the data for extant taxa. The data for the two orders of brachiopods (terebratulides and rhynchonellides) are separate. For each record, we give the name of the taxon (NB: we did not revise the taxonomy of these), the maximum length of an individual (in mm), geographic locality, source of the record, latitude (to the nearest half degree) and water depth (in m). Supplementary Information 2 refers to ...