Elevated evolutionary rates of biting biomechanics reveal patterns of extraordinary cranio-dental adaptations in some herbivorous dinosaurs

Adaptation to specialist ecologies is a key innovation that has contributed to the evolutionary success of many vertebrate clades, underpinning the acquisition of diverse skull morphologies. Dinosaurs, which dominated Mesozoic terrestrial faunas, acquired herbivory multiple times, including in clades historically regarded as predominantly carnivorous. The evolution of herbivory in theropod dinosaurs is linked to drastic changes in dental and craniomandibular functional morphology, yet whether such changes occurred more rapidly in herbivorous lineages compared to in carnivorous lineages remains untested in a phylogenetic framework. Here, we infer rates of phenotypic evolution in relative biting edge lengths to test the hypothesis that the acquisition of herbivory is associated with rapid changes in jaw biomechanics. We find elevated rates of biomechanical evolution in theropods with foreshortened and beaked skulls (Oviraptorosauria, Limusaurus), as well as in ceratopsians and Diplodocus...., Data were collected as measurements from published images using ImageJ, curated in Excel, wrangled in R and analysed in BayesTraits., , # Data from: Elevated evolutionary rates of biting biomechanics reveal patterns of extraordinary cranio-dental adaptations in some herbivorous dinosaurs

Linear morphometrics taken from images of dinosaur skulls, along with phylogeny analysed using variable-rate phylogenetic regression modelling in BayesTraits.

## Description of the data and file structure

### ---- \[\[Data-Primary.xlsx]] ----

Primary dataset file containing raw measurements, associated annotations and sources, as well as look-up table to match taxa in data and in the tree files. The file contains the following tabs:

**[Source tab]**\
List of images used for data collection, their sources (specimen number, reference), taxonomy, scale info.

Description of variables

* Taxon: Linean binomial
* Specimen: specimen number or unique identifier
* Image file name: the name of the image file
* Order: taxonomic order
* Scale (mm): the scale used to calibrate the image file
* Scale type: this denotes whether the...