International Thylacine Specimen Database
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The International Thylacine Specimen Database (ITSD) was completed in April 2005. It is the culmination of a four-year research project to catalogue and digitally photograph all known surviving specimen material of the Thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) (or Tasmanian tiger) held within museum, university, and private collections.
The ITSD has been designed as a free access academic tool to promote and facilitate undergraduate and postgraduate research into the species. It is now accessible to all researchers through the offices of the curators and heads of department of the university and museums that hold Thylacine material together with the libraries of several of the major zoological societies. The ITSD was released on three CD-ROMs totalling some 1.13 GB of data. The ITSD image bank comprises around 1700 specimen images and forms the largest single photographic resource of its kind anywhere in the world.
Specimen material within the ITSD comprises skins, skeletons, skulls, taxidermy mounts and wet specimens. Wet specimens are whole animals, organs or body parts that have been preserved in either alcohol or formalin. Specimens of the Thylacine are spread extensively around the globe so the search to locate these specimens was from the outset an international search involving a total of 98 museum, university and private collections in 20 countries.
The master copy of the ITSD is now held at the Zoological Society in London with mirror copies of this master held within the University of Tasmania in Hobart and the Australian National Wildlife Collection in Canberra. The master and mirror copies are kept constantly revised and updated as new information comes to light. The Zoological Society in London was chosen to hold the master copy of the ITSD because of its historic association with the Thylacine. The bulk of the early scientific papers on the species were published within its "Proceedings" and the society's zoo in Regent's Park exhibited more Thylacines than any other zoo outside Australia.
Each year the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales hosts the Whitley Awards. These awards are a tribute to Gilbert Whitley, the eminent Australian ichthyologist and are presented for outstanding publications that contain a significant amount of new information relating to the fauna of the Australasian region. In September 2005 the International Thylacine Specimen Database project was awarded the Whitley Award for the best zoological database.
