I am looking for good teaching examples that will illustrate methods for univariate and bivariate analysis of continuous variables. Here are two publicly available data sets that I like.
The first data set looks at sleeping time of mammals, from the African elephant to the yelllow-bellied marmot. You can get a brief description or you can look at the actual data. There is information on the body weight, brain weight, life span, gestation time, and indices of predation, exposure, and danger. This data set has a few missing values, designated by NA. There are 62 observations in this data set.
The second data set looks percentage of body fat, calculated by an underwater weighing method. It also has measurements that are easier to collect: age, weight, height, body mass index, and various other size measurements (neck circumference, chest circumference, etc.). You can view a brief description or look at the raw data. There is an article about this data set published in the Journal of Statistics Education. This data set has no missing values, but one extreme outlier (an individual who is 29.5 inches tall and 205 pounds). There are 252 observations in this data set.
Both files can be read in as delimited files (with spaces and/or tabs as delimiters). The latter data set could also be read in using a fixed column format.
You can find an earlier version of this page on my blog.