George Jennings Hinde was born on March 24, 1839, in Norwich, Norfolk, England.

He was a British geologist, paleontologist, and author. In 1855, at the age of sixteen, he became interested in the study of geology. He started to farm his own land near Norwich and in 1862, he continued sheep farming in Buenos Aires, Argentina for a few years. He returned to England, and for the rest of his life, having the means and the leisure, he devoted himself to the pursuit of science. He spent seven years in geological research in North America, from Nova Scotia to Nebraska and from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico. He studied geology at the University of Toronto, where he published his first geological paper "On the Fossils of the Clinton, Niagara and Guelph Formation of Ontario" (1875). In 1885, he became Assistant Editor of the Geological Magazine, an office he held for thirty-two years. He joined the Paleontographical Society in 1886 and became its Vice-President in 1916. In 1896, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1897, he was awarded the Lyell Medal by the Geological Society of London. He published the “Catalogue of the Fossil Sponges in the Geological Department of the British Museum (Natural History)” (1883). In 1888, he published with John William Dawson "New Species of Fossil Sponges from Little Metis, Province of Quebec, Canada".

In 1881, he married Edith Octavia Clark (1852–1943). He died on March 18, 1918, in Croydon, Surrey, England.