DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.12788353
title: Distribution-wide morphometric data of Jungle Crows (Corvus macrorhynchos)

description: Here we present a dataset derived from standardised photography of museum specimens of Jungle Crows (Corvus macrorhynchos), a widespread Asian Corvid. We photographed 1105 crows, of which 1069 we managed to collect measurements of hard tissue (i.e., bill characteristics and tarsus length). We combined these measurements with museum curated data on the locality of the specimens, resulting in a geo-tagged dataset of crow morphology. The measured crows originated from across their distribution, representing the most comprehensive morphometric dataset for Corvus macrorhynchos to date.

The data consists of three .csv files, and five zip files:



Museum Crow Measurements Metadata.csv contains the information on the columns contained in Museum Crow Measurements.csv split into Column and Details, where column names match those found in Museum Crow Measurements.csv, and details provide information on the data within that column.

Museum Crow Measurements.csv represents the core data table containing all hard tissue measurements of C. macrorhynchos alongside museum derived field and manually review location fields. Each row equals an individual specimen and missing data are denoted with <NA>.

Museum Crow Measurements Epicollect.csv contains the information collected alongside the images taken via Epicollect. The data was used to link photos and subsequent measurements to museum metadata.


Within the zip files are JPEG versions of the crow specimen photographs, seperated into dated folders, named with the original CANON folder they were saved in, the original image number they were created with, and the crow ID (C###{Canon folder number}_IMG_####{Image Number}_####{crow ID}.JPEG). The image number and crow ID match with information contained in Museum Crow Measurements Epicollect.csv. The information contained in Museum Crow Measurements Epicollect.csv pertaining to the number of first image was the basis for renaming the image files.



ANMH_{YYYY-MM-DD}.zip. The American Museum of Natural History in New York, USA

CUMV_{YYYY-MM-DD}.zip. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, USA

FMNH_{YYYY-MM-DD}.zip. The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, USA

NHMUK_{YYYY-MM-DD}.zip. The Natural History Museum at Tring, UK. Images for 2024-03-13 are split into two parts, indicated by _#, to reduce individual file size.

USNM_{YYYY-MM-DD}.zip. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., USA


Full description of the data can be found at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2025.111325 (Alamshah, A. L., & Marshall, B. M. (2025). Distribution-wide morphometric data of Jungle Crows (Corvus macrorhynchos). Data in Brief, 111325.)

Citations for use of this data are below:

@article{alamshah_distribution-wide_2025,    title = {Distribution-wide morphometric data of {Jungle} {Crows} ({Corvus} macrorhynchos)},    issn = {23523409},    url = {https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S2352340925000575},    doi = {10.1016/j.dib.2025.111325},    language = {en},    urldate = {2025-01-24},    journal = {Data in Brief},    author = {Alamshah, Aubrey Lynn and Marshall, Benjamin Michael},    month = jan,    year = {2025},    pages = {111325},}

@misc{alamshah_distribution-wide_2024,    title = {Distribution-wide morphometric data of {Jungle} {Crows} ({Corvus} macrorhynchos)},    copyright = {Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International},    url = {https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.12788353},    doi = {10.5281/ZENODO.12788353},    language = {en},    urldate = {2025-05-08},    publisher = {Zenodo},    author = {Alamshah, Aubrey and Marshall, Benjamin Michael},    month = jul,    year = {2024},    keywords = {Zoology, FOS: Biological sciences, Evolutionary biology, Ornithology},}

This data has been used in the following manuscript:

@article{alamshah_big_2025,  title={Big bills, small changes: with few exceptions, Jungle crows show minor variation in bill morphology across their distribution},  author={Alamshah, Aubrey Lynn and Marshall, Benjamin Michael},  year={2025},  publisher={EcoEvoRxiv},  doi={https://doi.org/10.32942/X2NW74}}