Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden was born on September 7, 1829, in Westfield, Massachusetts.

He was an American physician and geologist. In 1850, he graduated from Oberlin College and in 1853, from the Albany Medical College where he was introduced to geology and fossil collecting. He went on his first geological venture in the summer of 1853 and spent the remainder of the 1850s on various exploring and collecting expeditions in the northern Missouri River areas. During the Civil War, he served as an army surgeon. After the war, Hayden led geographic and geologic surveys of the Nebraska and Western Territories for the U.S. Government. In 1867, he was appointed geologist-in-charge of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories. In the 1870s, he organized and led many pioneering surveying expeditions of the Rocky Mountains and the Yellowstone region. He published numerous reports from his expeditions, e.g., the Yellowstone report which was instrumental in the creation of Yellowstone National Park. He was the author of "Geological and Geographical Atlas of Colorado" (1877). In 1860, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society and was made Professor of Geology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1865. Hayden was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society (1873) and a Foreign Member of the Geological Society of London (1879). The town of Hayden, Colorado, and Hayden Valley in Yellowstone is named after him.

In 1871, he married Emma C. Woodruff (1844–1934). He died on December 22, 1887, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.