A matter of weight: Critical comments on the basic data analysed by Maestri et al. (2016) in Journal of Biogeography, 43, 1192–1202

Recently, Maestri, Luza, et al. () assessed the effect of ecology and phylogeny on body size variation in communities of South American Sigmodontinae rodents. Regrettably, a cursory analysis of the data and the phylogeny used to address this question indicates that both are plagued with inaccuracies. We urge “big data” users to give due diligence at compiling data in order to avoid developing hypotheses based on insufficient or misleading basic information.