James Bell Pettigrew FRSE FRS FRCPE LLD (26 May 1834 – 30 January 1908) was a Scottish anatomist and noted naturalist, aviation pioneer and museum curator.

Pettigrew was an internationally acknowledged authority on animal locomotion and bird flight, which informed his invention of an early flying machine.

[3] Pettigrew flourished under the tutelage of John Goodsir with whom he developed a programme of research into the morphology of the human heart.

From an early age, Pettigrew demonstrated a remarkable flair for morphological analysis and an analytical grasp of natural history.

[5] In 1862, Pettigrew accepted the post of Assistant Curator at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

He had a passionate interest in animal locomotion and, more particularly, in the theory of flight, and around the turn of the century made several prototypes of an ornithopter of his own design.

In 1875, he was appointed to the Chandos Chair of Medicine and Anatomy at St Andrews University and established a home on The Scores which he called Swallowgate because of its situation which allowed him to observe birds in flight.

Over several subsequent years, Pettigrew assembled his magnum opus Design in Nature, published in three volumes and lavishly illustrated with engravings and photographs.

In this work, he showed some indifference to Darwinism and mainstream evolutionary biology, favouring teleological points of view instead.