John Gould was born in Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast in 1804 but was brought up in Surrey and later Windsor, where his father was one of the gardeners at the castle. The young Gould taught himself taxidermy from an early age and soon established a skill for the craft. Following a brief 18-month stint as gardener at Ripley Hall in Yorkshire, in 1824, he moved to London to establish a shop in the city.

The taxidermy enterprise was a successful one and Gould counted important public figures, including George IV (for whom he stuffed a pet giraffe in 1826), among his clients. In 1828, he won a competition to become taxidermist at the museum of the Zoological Society of London and eventually became the curator of the museum where he developed connections with some of the most prominent naturalists of the day and received specimens from around the world to preserve and prepare for display. He was also noted for his own knowledge of ornithology and in 1836 assisted Charles Darwin in understanding the specimens collected from the Beagle voyage to the Galapagos, demonstrating that the birds collected were not different species as Darwin initially thought, but varieties of the same species, thus inspiring his revolutionary theory of natural selection.

Gould began to publish fine ornithological volumes from 1830. They are among the most famous and important 'bird-books' of the nineteenth century and the volumes in the Royal Library were subscribed to by Prince Albert and Queen Victoria.

Inspired by specimens received in London, in 1838 Gould quit his job with the Zoological Society and moved with his family to Australia in order to see and collect specimens of Australian wildlife in person. First visiting Hobart in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania), before travelling through New South Wales and across to Adelaide, Gould, accompanied by John Gilbert (whom he had also brought from London), made sketches and collected examples of many different species of birdlife and mammals native to Australia in preparation for a comprehensive publication on the wildlife of the continent. Upon his return to Britain in 1840, Gould settled at Egham in Surrey and set about publishing the work. Despite the tragedy of losing his wife due to an illness following childbirth, The Birds of Australia was published in seven folio volumes between 1840 and 1848 (with a supplement following in 1868). It is a landmark in the history of Australia, being the first book to be published on Australian birdlife and was followed in 1863 with The Mammals of Australia, a three-volume work illustrating a variety of the wildlife of the Australian outback including kangaroos, wallabies, koalas and the now-extinct thylacine or Tasmanian tiger.

He provided the first description and illustration of several animals, including many new species of kangaroo, and has been described as the pioneer naturalist of Australia. Mammals of Australia was dedicated to the Prince Consort, who had died in 1861.