Introduction

Supplementary data associated with: "Whole body elongation drives coordinated vertebral shape evolution in Lake Malawi cichlid fishes". 

Data deposited here includes:

1) details about all of the specimens included in the study (all_specimen_data.xlsx), 

2) lateral images of the uCT-scans of each specimen used for collection of body shape measures (Specimen Lateral Images.zip), 

3) all vertebral coordinate data (Vertebrae Coordinates (Json).zip), 

4) ply files for all of the vertebrae used in the study (Vertebrae Models.zip) and, 

5) specimen and species data used in the analysis, including specimen lengths (specimen_lengths.csv); centrum aspect ratios (vertebral_aspect_ratios.csv); intervertebral distances (intervertebral_distances.csv) and species data (species_data.csv) subsetted from another dataset (10.5281/zenodo.19315359).

All code used in analysis has been deposited on GitHub and can be accessed here: https://github.com/callumbucklow/lake-malawi-vertebral-shape. This includes code to convert the JSON files into various formats for analysis.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) studentship (Grant No. 2445747), the John Fell Fund at the University of Oxford (Grant No. 0009780) and a European Research Council Starting Grant (No. 101163722, Counts). We thank Richard Durbin for the uCT-scans of the specimens in the CAMZM collection used in this study that were uCT-scanned at the Cambridge Biotomography Centre. The specimens were collected ethically under prescribed permits, and the results and data are published under an Access and Benefit Sharing agreement with the Government of Malawi. We acknowledge the contributions of Hannes Svardal, Karl Svardal, Richard Zatha, Bosco Rusuwa, George Turner and colleagues, and the Malawi Department of Fisheries and the Government of Malawi for their assistance in the collection of samples. We thank Liz Martin-Silverstone at the XTM Facility, Palaeobiology Research Group, University of Bristol for scanning the Maylandia zebra used in this study.  Thank you to the fish whose lives were sacrificed for this work.

Contact Details

Do not hestitate to contact me if you have any questions on: callum.bucklow@biology.ox.ac.uk or c.v.bucklow@gmail.com