Charles Overton Handley, Jr. (July 14, 1924 - June 9, 2000) was a zoologist and explorer who conducted various expeditions for the United States government.
In the summer after his high school graduation, Handley participated in an expedition to collect mammals in the Southern Appalachian mountains, with the Museum of Zoology of the University of Michigan.
After the war, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Alexander Wetmore, hired Handley to collect birds and mammals on a naval icebreaker expedition to the Arctic.
from the University of Michigan in 1947, and a Ph.D. in mammalogy from that institution in 1955, in the interim participating in expeditions to the High Arctic, Labrador, Guatemala, and the Kalahari Desert.
He later conducted extensive surveys of the mammals of Panama and Venezuela, with a particular interest in bats, which he continued to study late in his life.