Data from: The rise of biting during the cenozoic fueled reef fish body shape diversification

Diversity of feeding mechanisms is a hallmark of reef fishes, but the
history of this variation is not fully understood. Here, we explore the
emergence and proliferation of a biting mode of feeding, which enables
fishes to feed on attached benthic prey. We find that feeding modes other
than suction, including biting, ram biting, and an intermediate group that
uses both biting and suction, were nearly absent among the lineages of
teleost fishes inhabiting reefs prior to the end-Cretaceous mass
extinction, but benthic biting has rapidly increased in frequency since
then, to account for about 40% of reef species today. Further, we measured
the impact of feeding mode on body shape diversification in reef fishes.
We fit a model of multivariate character evolution to a dataset comprising
three-dimensional body shape of 1,530 species of teleost reef fishes
across 111 families. Dedicated biters have accumulated over half of the
body shape variation that suction feeders have in just 18% of the
evolutionary time by evolving body shape ~1.7 times faster than suction
feeders. As a possible response to the ecological and functional diversity
of attached prey, biters have dynamically evolved both into shapes that
resemble suction feeders as well as novel body forms characterized by
lateral compression and small jaws. The ascendance of species that use
biting mechanisms to feed on attached prey reshaped modern reef fish
assemblages and has been a major contributor to their ecological and
phenotypic diversification.