 The English zoologist Hugh Cott 's 1940 book Adaptive Coloration in Animals corrected Thayer 's errors , sometimes sharply : " Thus we find Thayer straining the theory to a fantastic extreme in an endeavour to make it cover almost every type of coloration in the animal kingdom . " Cott built on Thayer 's discoveries , developing a comprehensive view of camouflage based on " maximum disruptive contrast " , countershading and hundreds of examples . The book explained how disruptive camouflage worked , using streaks of boldly contrasting colour , paradoxically making objects less visible by breaking up their outlines . While Cott was more systematic and balanced in his view than Thayer , and did include some experimental evidence on the effectiveness of camouflage , his 500 @-@ page textbook was , like Thayer 's , mainly a natural history narrative which illustrated theories with examples . 
