Harold Burnell Carter, BVSc, DVSc (Hon), FRSE, AM; (3 January 1910 – 27 February 2005) was an Australian scientist whose work in the middle decades of the twentieth century at the CSIR (now CSIRO) – Australia's national scientific research organization – laid foundations for the scientific understanding of the biology of Merino fine wool – upon which much of Australia's economy depended at the time.

In the early 1940s, he drafted a plan for such laboratories, which he developed in discussion with his senior colleagues Lionel B.

[7] Following completion of the Sheep Biology Laboratory, Carter resigned from the CSIRO and took a position at the Animal Breeding Research Organisation in Edinburgh, Scotland.

[5] In the later decades of his life he devoted himself increasingly to primary historical scientific research on the origins of the Merino as a producer of fine wool.

This work culminated in a major biography of Sir Joseph Banks, a founder of Australia's Merino fine wool economy.