Raw data from: Differentiating siliceous particulate matter in the diets of mammalian herbivores

1. Silica is crucial to terrestrial plant life and geochemical cycling on Earth. It is also implicated in the evolution of mammalian teeth, but there is debate over which type of siliceous particle has exerted the strongest selective pressure on tooth morphology.
2. Debate revolves around the amorphous silica bodies (phytoliths) in plants and forms of siliceous grit––i.e., crystalline quartz (sand, soil, dust)––on plant surfaces. The problem is that conventional measures of silica often quantify both particle types simultaneously.
3. Here we describe a protocol that relies on heavy-liquid flotation to separate and quantify siliceous particulate matter in the diets of herbivores. The method is reproducible and well-suited to detecting species- or population-level differences in silica ingestion. In addition, we detected meaningful variation within the digestive tracts of cows, an outcome that supports the premise of ruminal fluid ‘washing’ of siliceous grit.
4. We used bootstrap resampli...