Data for: Multilevel analysis of integration and disparity in the mammalian skull

Biological variation is often considered in a scalable hierarchy, e.g., within the individual, within the populations, above the species level. Morphological integration, the concept of covariation among constituent parts of an organism, is also hierarchical; the degree to which these ‘modules’ covary is a matter of the scale of the study as well as underlying processes driving the covariation. Multilevel analyses of trait covariation are a valuable tool to infer the origins and historical persistence of morphological diversity. Here we investigate concordance in patterns of integration and modularity across three biological levels of variation: within a species, within two genera-level radiations, and among species at the family level. We demonstrate this approach using the skull of mammalian family Leporidae (rabbits and hares), which is morphologically diverse and has a rare-among-mammals functional signal of locomotion adaptation. We tested three alternative hypotheses of modularity..., All analyses were performed using the R Statistical Environment v. 4.2.1 (R Development Core Team 2022), using the geomorph package v.4.0.4 (Adams et al. 2022) unless otherwise stated, with statistical significance estimated using a permutation approach (1000 iterations) and evaluated at the significance level of 5%.
Samples
We sampled 317 specimens from 22 species across Leporidae representing the main lineages (Table S1), many of which featured in a previous study (Kraatz and Sherratt 2016), using predominantly museum collections (details in Supplementary file 1). For Oryctolagus cuniculus and Lepus europaeus, we could increase sampling with whole carcasses scavenged from pest control activities in Australia (ethics approved, details in acknowledgements), where these species were introduced on multiple occasions during the 1800s by European settlers from UK stocks (Peacock and Abbott 2013; Stott 2015). As the most widely distributed of all leporids, we restricted the O. cuniculus (her..., R Statistical Environment, R 4.2.1
library(geomorph) # v.4.0.4
library(ape) # v.5.6-2
library(vegan) # v.2.6-2
library(phytools) # v.1.2-0