The first scientific accounts on the anatomy of the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) primarily focused on the description of its external characteristics (Paterson 1805), (Harris 1808), (Saint-Hilaire 1810), (Temminck 1824).  Little if any detail was noted about the animal's internal structure.  Harris for example states:

    "On dissecting this quadruped, nothing particular was observed in the formation of its viscera differing from others of its genus (at the time, the thylacine was placed in the genus Dasyurus).  The stomach contained the partly digested remains of a porcupine anteater, Myrmecophaga aculeate" (=echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus).

    Surgeons, doctors and anatomists undertook much of the early investigative work on the internal anatomy of the thylacine for the principal purpose of comparison with other species and even today the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London still holds a substantial number of thylacine specimens within its zoological collection (Source: ITSD 2005).

    The published and unpublished works of Dr. Edward Crisp (1855), Sir William Henry Flower (1865), Professor D. J. Cunningham (1882), Frank E. Beddard (1891), Professor James P. Hill, Sir Colin MacKenzie, Bernard Tucker and more recently those of Pearson & De Bavay (1953), Professor Heinz Moeller (1968, 1970, 1997) and R. Leon Hughes (2000) have all significantly enhanced our knowledge of the internal anatomy of the thylacine.
 

. A pair of Cape hunting dogs (Lycaon pictus).  In 1855, Dr. Edward Crisp authored a paper in which he made comparisons between the anatomy of the thylacine and this species.  The Cape hunting dog is today among the most critically endangered of all wild canids.

Zoo animals provided some of the earliest specimens for detailed anatomical study.  A pair of thylacines, presented by Ronald Gunn and Dr. James Grant, and the first recorded at the London Zoo, were captive from 16 May 1850 until 25 September 1853 for the male and until 13 May 1857 for the female.  The male was the subject of a paper by Dr. Edward Crisp and published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society (Crisp 1855) in which he compared the anatomy of the thylacine with that of the Cape hunting dog (Lycaon pictus).

    Crisp accurately notes that the thylacine was the first to be dissected in the country and proceeds to perform a standard autopsy on the specimen that he describes as being excessively fat.  Crisp's specimen weighed 14.97 kg (33 lb.) and measured some 85 cm (2 ft. 9½ in.) from nose to base of the tail, with a tail length of 38 cm (15 in.).  Crisp measured and weighed each of the thylacine's internal organs and noted some structural points of interest with respect to its alimentary tract.  The spleen from Crisp's dissection is now preserved as a “wet” specimen in the collection of the Royal College of Surgeons (England) (Source ITSD 2005).

    Sir William Henry Flower (1831-1899) was the curator of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England between 1861-1884.  In 1865 he published a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London on the cerebral commissures of the brain in which he makes reference to the thylacine:

    "The large carnivorous marsupial, the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus), so widely separated in external characters from both the kangaroo and the wombat, shows the same general peculiarities of cerebral organisation, but attended with a smaller development of the superior transverse commissure, especially of its anterior part, and a greater reduction of the thickness of the interventricular septum".
 

    Flower's dissection of the brain of the thylacine is the first account noted in the literature.