Hugh Bamford Cott (6 July 1900 – 18 April 1987) was a British zoologist, an authority on both natural and military camouflage, and a scientific illustrator and photographer.

His book Adaptive Coloration in Animals (1940), popular among serving soldiers, was the major textbook on camouflage in zoology of the twentieth century.

As a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London, he undertook expeditions to Africa and the Amazon to collect specimens, mainly reptiles and amphibians.

[5][9] Cott was chief instructor at the Camouflage Development and Training Centre at Helwan, Egypt, under filmmaker Geoffrey Barkas from its inception in November 1941.

In his wartime lectures at Farnham Castle, he described nine categories of visual deception:[16] Cott's account of all this (illustrated by his own pen and ink drawings) is the 550-page book Adaptive Coloration in Animals (1940).

[19] His co-workers' first-hand accounts of his work in military camouflage can be found in the memoirs of two of his fellow camoufleurs: Julian Trevelyan[20] and Roland Penrose.

Although Cott does report experiments on predation to test the efficacy of mimicry and camouflage, the book is essentially a narrative of examples plus theory.

[22] For example, his black-and-white potoo shows this rainforest bird sitting motionless on a mottled tree trunk, its behaviour and disruptive pattern combining to provide effective camouflage.

[28] As a scientific illustrator and photographer, he also wrote three other books: Zoological photography in practice (1956); Uganda in black and white (1959); and Looking at animals: a zoologist in Africa (1975).

The writings of Wallace, Bates, Müller, Poulton and Cott truly stand up to the test of time: these individuals deserve even better renown not just as great natural historians but as exceptional scientists too.

[33]The biologist Steven Vogel commented that:[34] The zoologist Hugh Cott had the final word in Adaptive Coloration in Animals (1940), a definitive synthesis of everything known about camouflage and mimicry in nature.

Cott ruffled fewer feathers [than Trofim Lysenko or Vladimir Nabokov], and his well-organized and unfanatic ideas proved militarily effective, even under the scrutiny of improved techniques for target detection.

Thayer’s principles reemerged in more temperate and rational terms, and camouflage schemes based on them survived both photometric analyses and enemy encounters.