William T. Stanley (c. 1957 – October 6, 2015) was an American mammalogist who was a manager of the collections at one of the world's largest natural history museums and a student of the mammals of eastern Africa.
[1] Stanley and colleagues discovered multiple species new to science, including shrews, bats, rodents, frogs and primates while surveying the fauna of the Eastern Arc Mountains.
Two notable discoveries are the kipunji,[6] the first new genus of African monkey in nearly 100 years, and Thor's Hero Shrew,[9] the second species of mammal with a bizarre spinal morphology.
After graduating from High School Stanley lived in Brunei, worked on Kibbutz Be'eri in Israel, and refurbished a century old farmhouse in central Virginia.
In 1986, Stanley began working at the Humboldt State University Vertebrate Museum where he dissected and cleaned dead whale specimens that washed up on the beaches of Northern California.