Cleaned vertebrate phylogeny

Phylogeny used in analyses of trait evolution. Produced by combining published megaphylogenies including birds (Jetz et al. 2012), squamates (Pyron and Burbrink 2014), amphibians (Pyron and Wiens 2011) and fish (Rabosky et al. 2013). Mammals were constructed using Bininda-Emonds et al. 2007, Meredith et al. 2011 and phylogenies from the OpenTree of life database (Hinchliff et al. 2015) using the pipeline described in the manuscript. Trees were connected using dates from the timetree of life (Hedges et al. 2006) for the 5 major clades

Cleaned Kolokotrones dataset

Cleaned dataset from Kolokotrones et al. (2010) matched to our mammalian phylogeny. Columns are: lnBMR (log standard metabolic rate in mlO2h^-1 from Kolokotrones et al. 2010); lnMass (log body mass in grams from Kolokotrones et al. 2010); lnMass2 (squared log body mass in grams); TempK (body temperature^-1 in Kelvins^-1 from Kolokotrones et al. 2010, and the Pantheria database, Jones et al. 2009 when absent from Kolokotrones et al. 2010)

Early origin of sweet perception in the songbird radiation

From savory to sweet Seeing a bird eat nectar from a flower is a common sight in our world. The ability to detect sugars, however, is not ancestral in the bird lineage, where most species were carnivorous. Toda et al. looked at receptors within the largest group of birds, the passerines or songbirds, and found that the emergence of sweet detection involved a single shift in a receptor for umami (see the Perspective by Barker). This ancient change facilitated sugar detection not just in nectar feeding birds, but also across the songbird group, and in a way that was different from, though convergent with, that in hummingbirds. Science , abf6505, this issue p. 226 ; see also abj6746, p. 154 <br