John Young

John Young FGS (July 1823 – 13 March 1900) was a Scottish geologist, palaeontologist and a curator at the Hunterian Museum. He was a vice-president of the Glasgow Geological Society and of the Natural History Society of Glasgow, and was awarded both life membership of the Geological Society of London and money from their Murchison Medal Fund. He was made a Doctor of Laws by the University of Glasgow.

He named several taxa, and the species Chitonellus youngianus was named in his honour. Fossil specimens he collected are in the collection of Glasgow Museums.

Early life

Young was born in July 1823 in Lennoxtown, Scotland, to Jean (née Roberston) and Thomas Young, a carpenter. 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.

and when the British Association for the Advancement of Science met in Glasgow in 1855, Young was hired to create an exhibition of local fossils. Obituaries were published in Geologistical Magazine, the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society. and the Glasgow Herald.

The "John Young (1823-1900) Collection of Carboniferous invertebrates (brachiopods, crinoids, ostracods, corals, bivalves, etc)" was donated to Glasgow Museum by James Tullis in 1901, having formed the basis for the Catalogue of Western Scottish Fossils, compiled for another meeting of the British Association in Glasgow, in 1876.