John Samuel Budgett (16 June 1872 – 19 January 1904) was a British zoologist and embryologist. He spent most of his short career on the genus Polypterus (bichir). This is found in the lakes, river margins, swamps, and floodplains of tropical central and western Africa and the Nile River system. Zoologists at the time wondered whether it was a bony fish, a cartilaginous fish, a lungfish or a primitive amphibian. Forty years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, zoologists were seeking to map the history of species and this primitive animal was a key part of the map. To find its place there, it was necessary to observe juvenile Polypterus in the wild. It took Budgett four African expeditions but in the end he succeeded in doing so.

However, the long periods spent in swampy, mosquito-ridden places left him debilitated with malaria and he died of blackwater fever shortly after his return to England. This happened on the very day that he was supposed to deliver a lecture on his work to the Zoological Society of London. He didn’t even have time to write a report. However he did leave a full set of drawings and specimens. It was left to his friend and colleague John Graham Kerr to interpret them and write the report.

Budgett’s work remained the basis of understanding Polypterus development for almost 100 years.

In an earlier expedition with Kerr to the Gran Chaco in central South America, Budgett did useful work on the amphibians of that area and discovered two species of a new genus Lepidobatrachus asper and Lepidobatrachus laevis. The genus was named Budgett's Frog in his honour.

John Samuel Budgett was born at Redlands House, Bristol on 16 June 1872. His parents were William Henry Budgett (1827–1900) and Ann (née Lidgett, 1839–1936). When John was two they moved to Stoke House and Park, Stoke Bishop, Bristol.

William was a keen microscopist and served on the council of Bristol Museum. He was a keen amateur student of zoology and encouraged his children to study it. Professionally he was a partner in H.H. & S. Budgett, a successful wholesale grocery firm. Often he had professional scientists to stay during the summer and John was able to get informal tuition from them. Prominent among these was Professor William Kitchen Parker. For twenty-three consecutive years Parker spent a fortnight at Stoke Park. He was noted for his skill in preserving delicate skeletons, such as tadpoles and small birds, and he appears to have passed some of this skill to John.

Parker had studied the development of the skull and John began working on the topic himself, using his skills in dissection and specimen preparation. He designed a device for aligning serial sections that enabled him to construct models of the developing skull. He became an expert in this.

John was fascinated by the animal world, building aviaries and adapting outbuildings for a museum and a laboratory. The museum contained minute dissections, skeletons (including a cow and a deer) and stuffed animals all prepared by him and presented against natural-looking backgrounds. He visited Bristol Zoo often to obtain dead animals. He was skilled in keeping animals healthy, a good draftsman and watercolourist. In the summer he used to get up at 3 a.m. and walk miles to study animals and birds at dawn.