Data from: Independent evolution of baleen whale gigantism linked to Plio-Pleistocene ocean dynamics

Vertebrates have evolved to gigantic sizes repeatedly over the past 250 Myr and reach their extreme in today's baleen whales (Mysticeti). Hypotheses for the evolution of exceptionally large size in mysticetes range from niche partitioning to predator avoidance, but there has been no quantitative examination of body size evolutionary dynamics in this clade and it remains unclear when or why gigantism evolved. By fitting macroevolutionary models to a phylogenetic dataset consisting of body sizes for living and extinct mysticetes, we show that gigantism, defined as lengths > 10m, evolved abruptly during the Plio-Pleistocene due to a clade-wide shift in evolutionary mode that is temporally linked to the onset of intensified upwelling along coastal ecosystems. High prey densities resulting from wind-driven upwelling, rather than abundant resources alone, are the primary determinant of efficient foraging in extant mysticetes and late Pliocene changes in ocean dynamics may have provided an ecological pathway to gigantism in multiple independent lineages.