Morphological disparity is an aspect of avian evolution that remains understudied and has rarely been quantified explicitly, despite its importance for inferring patterns of avian evolution. Morphological and molecular data are now routinely used both in combination and in isolation to infer phylogeny and to study evolutionary rates. Similarly, parallel studies of phylogeny, diversity and morphological disparity are now commonplace in both the neontological and palaeontological literature (Giribet, 2015; Bromham et al., 2002; Hopkins and Gerber, 2017; Deline et al., 2018; Prum et al., 2015). Most recently, the concept of molecular disparity has been introduced as an analogue of morphological disparity, although there are few studies that attempt to deploy it (Deline et al., 2018; van den Ende et al., 2022). This chapter addresses ten related questions using the largest available morphological and molecular data set for birds.

This dataset was collated from publicly available resources. All previously published datasets were extensively modified in order to ensure consistent sampling across orders and genera. 

We obtained DNA sequences for 1104 loci of 104 bird species from https://b10k.genomics.cn/.

The morphological data contained herein is a pruned matrix originally published by Livezey and Zusy (2006). https://doi.org/10.2992/0145-9058(2006)37[1:PON]2.0.CO;2

Annual temperature, latitude, body mass, geographic range and HWI were obtained from Sheard et al., (2020) https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3747657

Evolutionary Distinctiveness scores were obtained from Jetz et al., (2014) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.03.011

The molecular sequence data with the .fas extension can be read in R using the package Ape and viewed with AliView.

The morphological datasets with the .nex extension can be opened with Mesquite and read in R using the package Claddis.