Systematic review of vertebrate limb bone content

This dataset shows a systematic review of the literature examining limb bone (femur, tibia, fibula, humerus, radius, ulna) characteristics in diverse vertebrates. These characteristics include ash content, percent phosphorus, bone mineral density, bone density, and bone mineral content (defined in dataset). 

Methods
We performed a systematic review to locate sources that measure bone in wild animals using one of the following metrics: total bone density, bone mineral density, and bone mineral content. To be included, papers had to (1) measure bone content in a wild or museum animal (we excluded experimental animals to remove human intervention as a confounding factor), (2) clearly state methodology and units, and (3) use only modern specimens (we excluded fossil animals because taphonomy affects bone). Although we read and assessed all relevant collected papers, we only extracted measurements from tetrapod limb bones (i.e. femur, tibia, fibula, humerus, radius, ulna). Limb bones were by far the most studied bones (for our search criteria) and focusing on them allowed us to compare similar bones across various taxa rather than looking at a limited dataset of more rarely studied bones. While this limited our scope and excluded fishes, this systematic review aimed not to comprehensively characterize bone content across species but to overview a subset of the vast variation found in bone.

We performed our literature search on January 20, 2022 on the Web of Science database, using the following search terms: TS = (bone mineral density OR bone density) NOT TS=(human* OR man OR woman OR women OR men OR athlet* OR dairy OR farm* OR poultry OR patient OR cancer OR child* OR girl* OR boy* OR menopaus* OR diabet* OR mouse OR mice OR metallurgy OR alloy*). We narrowed this search by removing human-centric topics and journals (e.g. kinesiology). This initial search resulted in 6586 papers. We scanned the titles of these papers to determine their relevance. Then, we read the abstracts of all potentially relevant papers and accepted or rejected them based on our criteria. Overall, we extracted 721 measures of bone content. We recorded sex, age group (fetus, neonate, juvenile, adult), and taxonomic information for each data point (where possible).