Hilmer Nils Erik Skoog, a Swedish naturalist, started his career
as an errand boy at the Naturhistoriska Museet (Natural History Museum) in Gothenburg,
Sweden, in 1884. He was promoted to assistant preparator in 1888, assistant curator in 1900 and to curator in January 1904, a position he held until his death in 1927. In 1909 he accompanied
Nordenskiold's expedition to Greenland to collect for the museum.
On 30 November 1911 Skoog left Sweden on his way to Cape
Town, planning to travel on a whaling ship from there to investigate the Crozet
Islands, in the southern Indian Ocean. However, he was delayed by bad weather
and when he reached Cape Town in January 1912 the whaling ship had left. During
the next three months he undertook collecting trips in the South Atlantic and
along the southern Cape coast (off Cape Infanta, St Sebastian Bay, Cape
Barracouta, and Walker Bay), and then established his headquarters at
Franskraal, a few kilometres inland from Gansbaai, Western Cape. In May he
collected marine invertebrates and the terrestrial fauna, including many birds
and bird parasites, in the region around Franskraal. The next month he left for
Port Alexander (now Tombua) on the coast of southwest Angola. There he
continued his excursions, both along the coast and inland, until November. At
some stage he also collected molluscs in Namibia. After returning to Franskraal
and some more collecting, he left for Sweden where he arrived in May 1913.
Skoog published four popular articles in Swedish journals during
1918-1919 on his work in southern Africa, including one on his adventures while
hunting buck at the Cape. His extensive collections all went to the Gothenburg
Museum, where the following groups were studied and described by various
specialists: Reptilia and Amphibia (Alexander, 1916), Tunicata (Michaelsen, 1923),
Ophiuroidea (Koehler, 1923), Bryozoa (Marcus, 1923), Mollusca (N. Odhner, 1923),
Pantopoda (Loman, 1923), Sipuneulida (Fischer, 1923), Crustacea Podophtalmata
(T. Odhner, 1923), Isopoda and Amphipoda (Stebbing, 1922), Copepoda (Wilson,
1923), Polychaeta (Fauval, 1923), Cestoda Tetrabothridia (Nybelin, 1916),
Nematoda Oxyuridae (Allgen, 1925), Octactinia (Molander, 1929), and Hydroidea
(Jaderholm, 1923). The Desert Plated Lizard, Gerrhosaurus skoogi (Family Gerrhosauridae), which occurs in Angola
and Namibia, was named after him, as was the South African marine mollusc Adinopsis skoogi.
