Raw data for: Over-eruption in marsupial carnivore teeth: compensation for a constraint

Pronounced over-eruption of the canine teeth, much greater than in eco-morphologically equivalent placental carnivores, occurs with age and growth in Australian marsupial carnivores. Suppression of functional tooth replacement is a characteristic of marsupials and is frequent among diverse placentals, where the primitive therian pattern is two generations of incisor, canine and premolar teeth. Rapid determinate growth is one among multiple hypotheses proposed to explain the loss of tooth replacement in mammals. In this line of reasoning, the animal reaches a sufficient body or jaw size to accommodate adult-sized teeth by the time it requires functional dentition. Marsupial carnivores have a full set of adult anterior teeth at weaning, which erupt into a juvenile jaw that is 25 to 30 % adult size, compared with well grown in placental carnivores. Indeterminate over-eruption of the canine teeth in marsupial carnivores results in increasing canine height and diameter with increasing body s..., The data are measurements of the teeth of carnivores. They were measured on both skull material in museums and on wild animals trapped in the field., The data are all in Excel files., # Raw data for 'Over-eruption in marsupial carnivore teeth: compensation for a constraint'

Give a brief summary of dataset contents, contextualized in experimental procedures and results.
The datasets contain metadata and measurements of the teeth of carnivore species, collected from museum specimens or from wild animals, and analysed to show species difference and changes with body size and age in tooth eruption and size.

## Description of the data and file structure

All measurements are in millimetres. Tooth wear scores are ordered categorical variables defined in the paper.
All blank cells are where data was missing; these are dealt with during analysis according to the format of the package.

There are four data files with contents and column headings as follows:

MRSPLC\_1\_Dryad.xls – museum measurements of canine teeth of placental and marsupial carnivores from museum collections. The first worksheet contains the data and the second worksheet the species names. Acronyms of col...