Bat morphological data of museum specimens collected over 180 years in Sweden

Heather Wood, Sara A.O. Cousins

This data set consists of morphological measurements of museum specimens of bats collected in Sweden over a 180 year time period. Three bat species were measured: Eptesicus nilssonii, Pipistrellus pygmaeus and Plecotus auritus (n=464). In total we measured 135 crania specimens (48 Eptesicus nilssonii, 43 Pipistrellus pygmaeus and 44 Plecotus auritus) and wings of 329 specimens (96 E. nilssonii, 149 P. pygmaeus and 84 P. auritus). Crania specimens dated from 1840⁠ – ⁠2014 whilst wing specimens were collected from 1839⁠ – ⁠2016 and specimens were examined in all decades with the exception of wing specimens from the 1990s. Only adult bats were measured.

We measured seven parameters of skulls: greatest skull length (GSL), mastoid breadth (MB), condylobasal length (CBL), cranial depth (CRD), canine breadth (CB), length from the cranio-mandibular joint to the origin of the masseter muscle (A) and length from the craniomandibular joint to the insertion of the masseter muscle at the bottom of the angular process (B). For the wing specimens we measured three features: forearm length, digit three and digit 5. From these measurements we calculated three indices: wing area index, aspect ratio index and tip index. In this data set we therefore provide 4 wing parameters: forearm length, wing area index, aspect ratio index and tip index.

We used this data in combination with high spatial and temporal resolution climate and land-use data to assess how bat cranial size and wing functional traits respond to changing climate and land-use over 180 years along a 1000 km latitudinal gradient.

Citation

Heather Wood, Sara A.O. Cousins (2022) Bat morphological data of museum specimens collected over 180 years in Sweden. Dataset version 1. Bolin Centre Database. https://doi.org/10.17043/wood-2022-bats-1

References

Wood H, Cousins SAO (2022) Temperature and forest cover interact antagonistically to drive changes in bat morphology. Journal of Animal Ecology. Accepted.

Data description

The data is comprised of one xlsx spreadsheet file with four tabs:

1. Crania measurements
2. Wing measurements
3. Museum records (this is the data relating to each specimen and was extracted from the museum's database or specimen label)
4. Metadata (this describes the data provided in Tabs 1⁠ – ⁠3)

Comments

Please, cite Wood & Cousins (2022) when using these data.