Early life
John Kingsley was born on 7 April 1854 at Cincinnatus, New York son of Lewis and Julia A. (née Kingman) Kingsley.
His father, who was then County Judge and Surrogate, moved to Norwich in 1856 where Kingsley was raised and received his early education at private schools. From his earliest years he took a keen interest in science, especially chemistry.

His connection with the Natural History Society of the college, however, caused him to decide upon biology as his life study; and upon his graduation in 1875 enrolled at the Peabody Academy of Science at Salem, Massachusetts, where he studied with Alpheus Spring Packard. Here his work was entirely in the line of systematic zoology, especially on crustaceans, that he published a number of papers on.

Career
Over his career Kingsley would author over three-hundred scientific articles and numerous books on such subjects as vertebrae zoology, comparative zoology and the anatomy of vertebrates. In 1902 he translated German zoologist Richard Hertwig’s ein Handbuch der Zoologie. Kingsley was one-time editor of the publications Standard Natural History (1884), and The American Naturalist (1886–96).[2] He had served over the years as president of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences at Lincoln,[6] and the American Morphological Society at Johns Hopkins University, and held memberships in a number of other scientific organizations both nationally and internationally.

Marriage
John Kinsgley married, on 31 January 1882, Mary Emma Read of Salem, Massachusetts. She was the daughter of a Salem produce dealer who several years after her birth served in the American Civil War. Kingsley's only child, Mary Winship, was born in 1883 at Melrose, Massachusetts

Death
John Sterling Kingsley died of a heart attack on 29 August 1929 while traveling with his daughter aboard the S.S. President Taft. At the time of his death the ship was some three days away from docking at Yokohama, Japan and the decision was made to commit his remains to the sea.