A restoration of Mammalodon by Brian Choo (published in Fitzgerald, 2009).

In the introduction to his 1883 lecture on whales, the English anatomist William Henry Flower said;

Few natural groups present so many remarkable, very obvious, and easily appreciated illustrations of several of the most important general laws which appear to have determined the structure of animal bodies, as that selected for my lecture this evening. We shall find the effects of the two opposing forces–that of heredity or conformation to ancestral characters, and that of adaptation to changed environment, whether brought about by the method of natural selection or otherwise–distinctly written in almost every part of their structure. Scarcely anywhere in the animal kingdom do we