DOI: 10.5061/dryad.m0cfxpp94
title: Systematic review of vertebrate limb bone content

description: This dataset shows a systematic review of the literature examining limb
 bone (femur, tibia, fibula, humerus, radius, ulna) characteristics in
 diverse vertebrates. These characteristics include ash content, percent
 phosphorus, bone mineral density, bone density, and bone mineral content
 (defined in dataset). 
description: We performed a systematic review to locate sources that measure
 bone in wild animals using one of the following metrics: total bone
 density, bone mineral density, and bone mineral content. To be included,
 papers had to (1) measure bone content in a wild or museum animal (we
 excluded experimental animals to remove human intervention as a
 confounding factor), (2) clearly state methodology and units, and (3) use
 only modern specimens (we excluded fossil animals because taphonomy
 affects bone). Although we read and assessed all relevant collected
 papers, we only extracted measurements from tetrapod limb bones (i.e.
 femur, tibia, fibula, humerus, radius, ulna). Limb bones were by far the
 most studied bones (for our search criteria) and focusing on them allowed
 us to compare similar bones across various taxa rather than looking at a
 limited dataset of more rarely studied bones. While this limited our scope
 and excluded fishes, this systematic review aimed not to comprehensively
 characterize bone content across species but to overview a subset of the
 vast variation found in bone. We performed our
 literature search on January 20, 2022 on the Web of Science database,
 using the following search terms: TS = (bone mineral density OR bone
 density) NOT TS=(human* OR man OR woman OR women OR men OR athlet* OR
 dairy OR farm* OR poultry OR patient OR cancer OR child* OR girl* OR boy*
 OR menopaus* OR diabet* OR mouse OR mice OR metallurgy OR alloy*). We
 narrowed this search by removing human-centric topics and journals (e.g.
 kinesiology). This initial search resulted in 6586 papers. We scanned the
 titles of these papers to determine their relevance. Then, we read the
 abstracts of all potentially relevant papers and accepted or rejected them
 based on our criteria. Overall, we extracted 721 measures of bone content.
 We recorded sex, age group (fetus, neonate, juvenile, adult), and
 taxonomic information for each data point (where possible).
description: # Systematic review of vertebrate limb bone content
 ## Description of the data
 and file structure This dataset consists of an excel spreadsheet with 6
 sheets. 1\. Sheet descriptions: describes what is in each of the other 4
 sheets. 2\. Metadata: describes the headings for the "core data"
 sheet. 3\. Abbreviations 4\. Types: describes the different bone
 measurements included in our dataset. 5\. Core data: all bone measurements
 collected in our systematic review, along with the other data described in
 "metadata" 6\. Accession numbers: citations for all data
 included in the dataset. Accession numbers are also included in "core
 data" so they can be matched easily. Because of the nature of our
 dataset (several types of measurements, and no single data entry had every
 single one), there are many blanks in our dataset. They are filled as
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