George became interested in entomology through his father and he founded the Entomological Society of London along with
Frederick William Hope in 1833 with himself as honorary curator. He became its president in 1849–50. He wrote articles for Knight's
Penny Cyclopædia. The Royal Institution at Liverpool appointed him curator of its museum in 1835 and he exchanged this in 1836 for a position at the
Zoological Society of London. His early work was on cataloguing the mammals at the museum and although he completed the work the next year, it was not published as he had not followed the
quinary system of that time. He was invited to join
Charles Darwin on the voyage of the Beagle but he declined it. On Darwin's return, the collection of mammals and beetles was entrusted to him. In November 1843 he became an assistant in the mineralogical department of the
British Museum of Natural History. He became keeper in 1851 upon the death of
Charles Konig and held the position until his retirement in 1880. He died at Putney on 21 January 1888. He had three sons (
Charles Owen Waterhouse, Frederick Herschel Waterhouse, and Edward Alexander Waterhouse), all coleopterists, and three daughters. Waterhouse was the author of
A natural history of the Mammalia (1846–48). The work was begun in 1844 was done slowly as the original French publisher M. Hippolyte Baillière was unable to take it up. The two volumes covered the marsupials and the rodents. The famous
Archaeopteryx specimen was acquired when he was curator. Amongst the numerous species he described are the
numbat (
Myrmecobius fasciatus), and the Syrian or golden hamster (
Mesocricetus auratus). He also assisted
Louis Agassiz with his
Nomenclator Zoologicus (1842). ==Publications==