It formed part of the ongoing debate amongst zoologists about the relevance of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection to the observed appearance, structure, and behaviour of animals, and vice versa.

The scientist reviewers Joel Asaph Allen, Edward Bagnall Poulton and Robert Wilson Shufeldt took up different positions on the book and accordingly praised or criticized Beddard's work.

Beddard wrote Animal Coloration at a time when scientists' confidence in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection[1] was at a low ebb.

"[P 2] He also notes that since Poulton's recent book "deal[s] with colour almost entirely from the point of view of natural selection, I have attempted to lay some stress upon other aspects of the question.

[P 3] The examples are mainly from Beddard's own observation of "animals that may be usually seen in the Zoological Society's Gardens",[P 3] though he also introduces and quotes the work of other scientists, including Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace.

Reviewing the chapter on warning coloration, Allen remarks that the great horned owl is known to prey on the skunk, showing that even such a disagreeably pungent animal can be subject to predation.

[3] On mimicry, Allen is critical of Bates's theory, arguing that edible mimics (such as flies) are often not protected by resembling distasteful models (such as wasps).

[4] The white supremacist scientist Robert Wilson Shufeldt reviewed Animal Coloration in Science in 1892, praising it as a concise and useful summary of the subject.

[5] The anonymous reviewer in Popular Science Monthly in December 1892 writes that Beddard has "made a book interesting to both the zoologist and the general reader.

For example, the book illuminates the progress of Darwinism, camouflage research, sexual selection, mimicry and the debate on the purpose of animal coloration triggered by Abbott Thayer.

[7] The zoologist Martin Stevens and colleagues, in 2006, write that "almost all early discussions of camouflage were of the background-matching type", citing Wallace, Poulton, and Beddard, "until the pioneering work of Thayer (1909) and Cott (1940)", which added disruptive coloration.

Beddard, they write, observed the results of feeding the drone fly Eristalis tenax, a harmless but intimidating Batesian mimic of honeybees, to various predators.

[13] The historian of science Sharon Kingsland, in a 1978 paper on Abbott Thayer and the protective coloration debate, uses Beddard repeatedly to illuminate the different strands of the argument.

Furthermore, argues Kingsland, again citing Beddard (p. 148), another major protagonist, Alfred Russel Wallace, was emphasizing the problem of conspicuous markings, which could be selected for as warning coloration.

[14] Wallace went so far as to argue, notes Kingsland, that bright colours in sexual dimorphism "resulted from a surplus of vital energy", citing Beddard p. 263 ff.