All of the images and animation sequences on this website are protected by copyright. All rights are reserved. Please do not copy any of the images without written permission from me, Ted W. Cranford, or the copyright holder. The holder of each copyright is indicated in the text just below each image. If you have any questions or would like to use any of these images for personal, commercial, or educational purposes, please contact me for terms, conditions, expressed written permission and/or additional information.

Send email to: Ted Cranford, at Whale Science for more information

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The pages on this website contain images that I have either produced, contributed to, or collected in an attempt to understand the structure and function of cetacean cephalic anatomy (whale head structure). The purpose of this website is to promote understanding of structure and function, primarily using examples from the heads of whales but not exclusively. My hope is, by displaying some of these images and providing some ancillary information, that I might sow seeds of understanding cetacean cephalic form and function. Perhaps by seeing these images and reading the accompanying information your understanding of the subject matter will be attained more quickly and completely than it otherwise might have been.

This first webpage (Volume 1) contains images from sperm whales, perhaps the most enigmatic odontocete. These images also supplement the information presented in a formal article entitled: "The Sperm Whale's Nose: Sexual Selection on a Grand Scale?" This paper was published in the October 1999 issue of Marine Mammal Science. If you want more detailed information about the anatomy in the nose of the sperm whale (and some plausible explanations of its function), go to your nearest university library and read this paper or the references therein.

Subsequent webpages (Volumes) appearing on this website will contain images that convey information about other marine mammals, including toothed whales (odontocetes) and baleen whales (mysticetes), and some non-cetacean marine mammals. I will also periodically post photographs of individuals that have some historic significance to the field of marine mammalogy. Most of the images are initially displayed as low-resolution thumbnails (so they will display more quickly) but most will contain links to higher resolution images that you may examine (just click on the image).