Beginning in the 1930s and spanning sixty years, Ole's empirical research focused on the early diversification of terrestrial vertebrates of the North American Permian. Fertilized by Ole's interdisciplinary perspective, this research became the seedbed that sprouted ideas concerning long-term dynamics of ecological communities and their effects on evolution. Limitations of the Permian fossil record stimulated his development of novel applications of geological and statistical methods to paleontology. His research anticipated current developments in the use of fossils to address mechanistic issues in biology² and in morphometrics.³ Cold War-era travel to Moscow to compare Russian fossils with those from North America and South Africa introduced him to taphonomy, which he popularized in Western paleontology. Ole's influence was amplified by his creation of a highly successful interdisciplinary paleozoology program at the University of Chicago.

Ole was the younger of Aimee Hicks Olson and Claire Myron Olson's two sons. He was born on November 6, 1910, in Waupaca, Wisconsin, and grew up in Hinsdale, Illinois, a small rural suburb of Chicago. His childhood was idyllic, both because his parents indulged his passion for natural history and because he excelled at everything. He was an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Chicago, where he was trained by Alfred S. Romer and where he spent most of his career. Everett Olson and Lila Richardson Baker were married in 1939 and had three children, Claire (b. 1940), George (b. 1943), and Mary Ellen (b. 1946). They raised them in the Chicago area before moving in 1969 to the University of California, Los Angeles. Ole was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1980. Although he taught for many years after retirement and con-