Abstract:Why some animals have big brains and others do not has intrigued scholars for millennia. Yet, the taxonomic scope of brain size research is limited to a few mammal lineages. Here we present a brain size dataset compiled from the literature for 1552 species with representation from 28 extant taxonomic orders. The brain-body size allometry across all mammals is = −1.26 ( ) 2.34 . This relationship shows strong phylogenetic signal as expected due to shared evolutionary histories. Slopes using median species value… Show more
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