John Young FGS (July 1823 – 13 March 1900) was a Scottish geologist, palaeontologist and a curator at the Hunterian Museum.

[1] His early career was as a messenger-boy and later apprentice block cutter in the Lennoxtown textile printing mill where his father worked as a foreman joiner.

[1] In his history of the Glasgow Geological Society, Murray Macgregor writes:[3] By 1850 John Young of Campsie district fame had become a recognised authority on local geologyand when the British Association for the Advancement of Science met in Glasgow in 1855, Young was hired to create an exhibition of local fossils.

[3] In 1859 Young was appointed assistant curator at the Hunterian Museum, having received the backing of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin and other senior figures in local societies.

[1] In 1877 he was made a vice president of the Natural History Society of Glasgow, having joined in 1852, and been subsequently elected a life member.

[1] The latter said:[1] The museum contains abundant evidence of the knowledge, zeal, and skill which have made its fossil and mineralogical departments objects of interest to men of science everywhere, while the reputation of the University was enhanced by having on its staff one whose work was valued as it was widely known.James Walker Kirkby named the species Chitonellus youngianus after Young, in a paper they co-authored in 1865.