Eye morphology contributes to the ecology and evolution of the avian tree of life

The avian eye is the single most important external anatomical trait for interpreting light environments by birds and varies widely in size and shape across the avian tree of life. The attached dataset provides measurements on eye size taken from preserved museum specimens for roughly one third of the avian tree of life (N = 3,475 species). The original dataset was collected by Stanley Ritland and Alice Hutchinson and archived as appendices in Stanley Ritland’s Dissertation from the University of Chicago (1982): “The Allometry of the Vertebrate Eye”.