Storrs L. Olson

Storrs Lovejoy Olson (born April 3, 1944 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American biologist and ornithologist from the Smithsonian Institution. He is one of the world's foremost avian paleontologists. He achieved a BSc in biology 1965 and a DSc in paleornithology in 1969, at the faculty of biology of Johns Hopkins University.

An appointment with Alexander Wetmore in 1967 led him to his main research field of paleornithology and to his work on Ascension Island and Saint Helena where he made remarkable discoveries in the 1970s, including the Saint Helena hoopoe and the Saint Helena crake. In 1976 he met his future wife Helen F. James who later became another known paleornithologist herself, focusing on Late Quaternary prehistoric birds.

During their pioneering research work on Hawaii, which lasted 23 years, Olson and James found and described the remains of 50 extinct bird species new to science, including the nēnē-nui, the moa-nalos the apteribises, and the Grallistrix "stilt-owls". He was also one of the authors of the description of the extinct rodent Noronhomys vespuccii. In 1982, he discovered subfossil bones of the long ignored Brace's emerald on the Bahamas, which gave evidence that this hummingbird is a valid and distinct species. In November 1999, Olson wrote an open letter to the National Geographic Society, in which he criticized Christopher P. Sloan's claims about the dinosaur-to-bird transition which referred to the fake species Archaeoraptor. In 2000, he helped to resolve the mystery of Necropsar leguati from the World Museum Liverpool, which turned out to be an albinistic specimen of the grey trembler.