Stanley John Olsen

Following his Honorable Discharge from the U.S. Navy in November 1945, Olsen found employment as a fossil preparator in the vertebrate paleontological laboratory of Alfred Sherwood Romer in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.

The holotype of the ciconiid, Propelargus olseni, is a partial left tarsometatarsus discovered by Olsen in August 1961 in Middle Hemingfordian Torreya Formation deposits near Tallahassee and is now in the Florida Museum of Natural History's Pierce Brodkorb Ornithology Collection (catalog number 8504).

[1] His familiarity with SCUBA and a developing interest in the archaeology of the Colonial period United States led to Olsen's appointment by Governor Ferris Bryant as Director of Florida's Marine Salvage Committee in 1964.

The Gulf and Atlantic coasts’ abundant shipwrecks were only beginning to be recognized as a resource for both scientific study and financial exploitation and the Salvage Committee's challenge was to initiate accommodation between these two potentially antithetical goals.

Olsen's work on the Salvage Committee was tangentially responsible for kindling his interest in Colonial European exploitation of domestic animals, a research focus that proved lifelong and best exemplified by his innovative analysis of faunal remains recovered from the Spanish ship Nuestra Señora de Atocha.

Under Barbara Lawrence's influence during his frequent research trips to Harvard in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Olsen began to work more and more closely with archaeologists in their then fledgling attempts to incorporate the analysis and interpretation of animal remains from anthropogenic deposits into the body of traditional archaeological literature.

During his half-century professional career, Olsen conducted paleontological and zooarchaeological fieldwork in the U.S., Canada, Colombia, Belize, China, Tibet, India, Italy, Cyprus, and Nepal and worked extensively with museum collections in Great Britain, Russia, Egypt, and Sweden as well as the United States.