Morphological and morphometric data on the axial skeleton of the little skate, Leucoraja erinacea

CT scans of adult little skates (Leucoraja erinacea). These scans consist of series of tiff images that can be imported into CT segmenting software to reconstruct their shape in three dimensions. Supplemental files include CT scanning parameters, landmark coordinates for each vertebra in each skate, up to vertebra 70, as well as an R script with code for analysing vertebral shape using morphometrics and segmented linear regression tests.

Computed tomography scans of three adult little skates were obtained in order to quantitatively study vertebral column morphology and regionalization. The skate fins were removed to facilitate shipping to our scanning facility, and so the scans include only the head, gill basket, and axial column. The specimens are now housed in the University of Cambridge Museum of Zoology (specimen identification numbers 2021.50.1, 20201.50.2, and 2021.50.3).