Sir Norman Boyd Kinnear (11 August 1882 – 11 August 1957) was a Scottish zoologist and ornithologist.
Early life
Kinnear was the younger son of wealthy Edinburgh architect Charles George Hood Kinnear and his wife, Jessie Jane, and came from the same banking family (Thomas Kinnear & Company) as Sir William Jardine (Kinnear's great-grandfather).
Kinnear studied at Edinburgh Academy before moving to Trinity College, Glenalmond. He worked as an assistant in an estate in Lanarkshire before he followed his interest in natural history and volunteered at the Royal Scottish Museum with W. Eagle Clarke in 1905–1907. He joined Eagle Clarke to Fair Isle. In 1907, he went aboard a whaling ship around Greenland to collect bird specimens.
During this time, he prepared a booklet on the animals of Mesopotamia.
Natural History Museum
In 1920 he returned to Britain and became an assistant in the Department of Zoology at the Natural History Museum, becoming Keeper of Zoology in 1945.
Aged 65 in August 1947, then the normal age of retirement, the trustees decided to appoint Kinnear as director of the museum. He was appointed a CB in 1948. He retired on 30 April 1950 and was knighted in June of that year.