Stuart Oliver Ridley

Stuart Oliver Ridley (1853–1935) was an English cleric and zoologist.

Early life He was born in 1853, the son of the Rev. Oliver Matthew Ridley and his first wife Laura Pole Stuart (died 1858), daughter of Sir William Stuart; Henry Nicholas Ridley was a younger brother.

Ridley matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1872. He moved in 1873 to Exeter College, where he graduated B.A. in 1875 (1st class in Natural Sciences), M.A. in 1881. He also studied under Ernst Haeckel. and was vicar of Staverton, Wiltshire from 1897 to 1905. He had two sisters, of his father's first marriage, one of whom was a deaconess of the Church of England.

Ridley became vicar of Scarisbrick, where he was from 1905 to 1911, succeeding his brother Charles William Ridley (1856–1905); and of Compton Bishop, near Axbridge in Somerset, where he was from 1911 to 1916. He died in 1935. In 1883 his paper was one of a number arising from Francis Day's collection on the 1882 survey cruise of HMS Triton off Scotland. He published on the genus Lophopus of bryozoa in 1886. Also in 1886, he published a paper in The Zoologist with his brother Henry Nicholas Ridley, Animal Life in High Latitudes on the Norway Coast.

Ridley worked on the report of the Challenger expedition. He was succeeded in his position in the Zoological Department of the British Museum in 1887 by Arthur Dendy. They published joint papers on the expedition's sponge specimens, and then Dendy and Ridley wrote for the Challenger report Part LIX (Volume XX.), Report on the Monaxonida (1887). The Biographical Etymology of Marine Organism Names (BEMON) lists under Dendy's name 14 species named for Ridley.

Ridley's main duties at the British Museum were in the area of sponges. He was an early contact there of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, the makers of glass models. After his departure, the correspondence was taken up by Albert Günther.