The dentary of hadrosauroid dinosaurs: evolution through heterochrony

The near-global success reached by hadrosaurid dinosaurs during the Cretaceous has been attributed to mastication, a behaviour commonly recognized as a mammalian adaptation. Its occurrence in a non-mammalian lineage should be accompanied by the evolution of several morphological modifications associated with food acquisition and processing. This study investigated morphological variation in the dentary, a major element of the hadrosauroid lower jaw. Eighty-four hadrosauroid dentaries were subjected to geometric morphometric and statistical analyses to investigate their taxonomic, ontogenetic, and individual variation. Results suggest increased food acquisition and processing efficiency in saurolophids through a complex pattern of evolutionary and growth-related changes. The edentulous region grew longer relative to dentary length, allowing for food acquisition specialization anteriorly and processing posteriorly, and became ventrally directed, possibly associated with foraging low-growi..., The dataset was collected from the literature (see the publication's online Supporting Information for a dataset reference list) and digital libraries of Dr. Albert Prieto-Márquez. Information pertaining to hadrosauroid dinosaur dentary specimens was written into the dataset using Excel. Images of specimens were made into a .TPS file in tpsUtil, and then digitized with equidistant semilandmark curves in tpsDIG2. The sliders file was created in tpsUtil. The .TPS file and sliders file were then transferred into the program R, and used together with the dataset (see the file \"SOEDERBLOM_et_al_Appendix_S1.txt\" in Zenodo or the publication's online Supporting Information), to analyze the digitized data, using the R script., A text editor (e.g. Notepad [optional]), Excel, tpsUtil, tpsDIG2, and R are required to view and/or use the data files., # Data from: The dentary of hadrosauroid dinosaurs: evolution through heterochrony

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The complementary dataset on hadrosauroid dinosaur dentaries, is stored on Zenodo, as well as with the publication \"The dentary of hadrosauroid dinosaurs: evolution through heterochrony\" supporting information, as a tab-delimited .txt file (Appendix S1). The dataset contains information such as specimen number, data source, page number, figure number, taxonomic, temporal, ontogenetic (growth stage), geographic and stratigraphic affinity (information on references used in the dataset is also found in the supporting information for the aforementioned publication). The dataset is utilized in analyzing hadrosauroid dentary morphology, using two-dimensional geometric morphometrics.

## Description of the data and file structure

SOEDERBLOM\_et\_al\_Data
\|\- SOEDERBLOM\_et\_al\_Appendix\_S1\.txt \(stored at the Zenodo archive\)
\|\- SOEDERBLOM\_et\_al\_TPS\_file\_Hadrosauroid\_Dentary\.TPS
\|\- SOEDERBLO...