CHICAGO — The Field Museum has created a memorial page for Bill Stanley, its longtime award-winning zoologist who died on an African expedition last year.
The page is filled with several photos of Stanley from his time in the field and at the Field Museum. Stanley, the former head of the museum's extensive mammal collection, suffered a fatal heart attack Oct. 6 while working in the Ethiopian mountains. He was 58 years old.
"The idea of making a page that honored his memory and detailed his accomplishments seems like one good way to make a lasting, public-facing tribute," said Mark Alvey, the Field Museum's Science Communications Manager. "Bill had a gift for connecting easily with anyone — from museum trustees to little kids watching him skin an otter on Members’ Night. And he did it all in basically the same register, I mean he talked to the trustees the same as the little kids — clear, funny and enthusiastic."
A Hyde Park resident, Stanley oversaw the more than 220,000 mammals in the Field's collection. He was was born in Beirut, moved to northern California, spent eight years in Kenya — graduating from a high school in Nairobi — lived on a Kibbutz in Israel, went to Virginia to remodel an old farmhouse and attended college back in northern California.
It was his time in Africa that truly shaped Stanley's life, Stanley told DNAinfo in 2013. While in Nairobi, where his father, Bob, worked for Bank of America, Stanley hunted on safaris and became fascinated with animals.
When Stanley was 11, he captured a butterfly he thought was a new species, and his mom took him to the National Museum of Kenya, where she was a volunteer. There, Stanley met researcher Mike Clifton, who walked Stanley into a "huge, giant room with cases stacked three high." And when Clifton opened one particular case, it was filled with hundreds of the same butterfly Stanley had found.
"To this day, I can close my eyes, and I can feel the switch turned on," Stanley said in 2013. "I knew then this is what I wanted to do. I was so hooked into it."
Stanley started working at the Field Museum in 1989, showing off the mammal collection to fascinated children and adults, while spending a good deal of time overseas in the field.
More than 700 people came to Stanley's memorial service last year. The memorial page, which was just released, is the perfect way to honor him, Alvey said.
"Bill was an accomplished scientist with more than 70 publications and several new species to his credit, but all the people he touched as a friend, colleague, teacher, and ambassador for science — that’s his legacy," Alvey said.
Check out photos of Stanley in the slideshow above or in the pics below:
Collecting tissue for the CDC during fieldwork in the Congo, 2013. [Courtesy of the CDC]
One of Bill’s favorite teaching tools, the skin of a gigantic flying squirrel (Petaurista elegans) from Borneo (1996). [John Weinstein]
Stanley gives visitors an up-close look at mammal preparation as part of a public program called “Nature Works” in 1991. [James Balodimas]
Stannley and Mary Anne Rogers during fieldwork on Mt. Kilimanjaro in 2002 (Kibo, one of Kilimanjaro’s peaks, in the background). [Mary Anne Rogers]
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