Carl Stål (21 March 1833 – 13 June 1878) was a Swedish entomologist specialising in Hemiptera.

[1] He was the son of architect, author and officer Carl Stål then Colonel, Swedish Corps of Engineers.

The same year he became assistant to Carl Henrik Boheman in the Zoological department of the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, where, in 1867, he was appointed keeper with the title of professor.

A significant part of Stål's work was the study of insects collected from Caffraria, the majority of which were poorly understood at the time.

Although Stål, who was regarded as the world's foremost worker on Hemiptera, published most on this order, he also worked on Orthoptera and to a lesser extent on Coleoptera and Hymenoptera, naming well over 1000 new genera and over 1500 new species over his brief career.