DOI: 10.5061/dryad.5tb2rbphd
title: Data from: Tetrapod vocal evolution reveals faster rates and higher-pitched sounds for mammals

description: Using the voice to produce sound is a widespread form of communication and
 plays an important role across a wide range species as well as contexts.
 Variation in the rate and mode of sound production has been extensively
 studied across different orders or classes, but understanding vocal signal
 evolution ultimately requires comparison across all major lineages
 involved. Here we used phylogenetic comparative methods to investigate the
 evolution of dominant frequency and its association with body weight
 across a balanced set of 873 species of mammals, birds, and frogs. Our
 results show that all vocal systems share the same general feature of the
 negative allometric relationship between body weight and dominant
 frequency, but that mammals clearly deviate compared to frogs and birds.
 We found mammals to vocalize at much higher frequencie,s and their signals
 evolved 4 to 6-fold faster compared to other tetrapod clades. Although all
 three groups strongly rely on vocal communication, our findings show that
 only mammals have extensively explored the spectral acoustic space. We
 argue that such high vocal diversity of mammals is made possible by their
 unique hearing system, and discuss the functional drivers that allowed
 their shared ancestors to evolve a richer array of frequencies than other
 tetrapods.
description: # Data from: Tetrapod vocal evolution reveals faster rates and
 higher-pitched sounds for mammals Dataset DOI:
 [10.5061/dryad.5tb2rbphd](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.5tb2rbphd) ##
 Description of the data and file structure Body mass and vocal frequency
 data from mammals, birds and frogs. ### Files and variables **Data file:**
 Munoz_Marsot_et_al_2025_Evolution.xlsx ##### Variables | Column |
 Explanation | | :-------------- |
 :--------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Species = | Species name according to the tetrapod phylogeny in Chen & Wiens (2020) Nat. Comm. | | Family =  | Taxonomic family | | Order = | Taxonomic order | | Class =  | Taxonomic class | | BM =  | Body mass in grams | | DF =  | Dominant frequency (or equivalent measure) in Hz | | Reference\_BM = | Reference for body mass data | | Reference\_DF = | Reference for dominant frequency data | | DF\_comment = | Comment associated to dominant frequency data | Missing data is indicated as "NA" **Scripts necessary for running the analyses are:** * Tetrapod_evolution_analyses.R * modif_laplacian_functions.R * bayou_birds.R * bayou_frogs.R * bayou_mammals.R The session information (obtained from calling `sessionInfo()` inside R), including R and library versions used for the analyses, are shown at the bottom of each script.  The phylogenetic tree (see below) and file containing the data (excel file) should be in the working directory inside a folder named "Tree_and_data" for the scripts to run adequately.  The "modif_laplacian_functions.R" file  contains a modification of the `spectR_t()` function from the RPANDA package (Morlon et al., 2016) to allow custom plotting the spectra of eigenvalues for the modified graph Laplacian of a tree with trait data, and should be saved in the working directory for the scripts to run adequately. **Phylogenetic tree from Chen & Wiens (2020) as text file:** * Tetrapodtree.txt **References:** 1. Chen, Z., & Wiens, J. J. (2020). The origins of acoustic communication in vertebrates. *Nature Communications*, 11(1), 369. 2. Morlon, H., Lewitus, E., Condamine, F. L., Manceau, M., Clavel, J., & Drury, J. (2016). RPANDA: an R package for macroevolutionary analyses on phylogenetic trees. *Methods in Ecology and Evolution*, *7*(5), 589-597.