Georg Ossian Sars
Norwegian marine and freshwater biologist (1837–1927)

Georg Ossian Sars HFRSE (20 April 1837 – 9 April 1927) was a Norwegian marine and freshwater biologist. He was a professor of zoology at the University of Oslo from 1874 to 1918. He was a pioneer of Norwegian fisheries research and was involved in establishing hatcheries for marine fish. He wrote a major work on the crustacea of Norway. The Ossian Sars Nature Reserve was named after him.
Life
Georg Ossian Sars was born on 20 April 1837 in Florø, Norway (now part of Kinn Municipality), the son of Pastor Michael Sars and Maren Sars; the historian Ernst Sars was his elder brother, and the singer and women's skiing pioneer Eva Nansen was his younger sister. He grew up in Manger Municipality in Hordaland, where his father was the local priest. He studied from 1852 to 1854 at Bergen Cathedral School, from 1854 at Christiania Cathedral School, and joined the university at Christiana (now the University of Oslo) in 1857. His father was an extraordinary professor of zoology at Oslo in the same period. He indulged his interest in natural history while studying medicine; having collected water fleas in local lakes with Wilhelm Lilljeborg's works, he discovered new species, and this resulted in his first scientific publication.
“Georg Ossian Sars” enters the record as norwegian marine and freshwater biologist (1837–1927). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Georg, Ossian and Sars can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Georg Ossian Sars” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.