Click any individual in the tree to recentre on them. Their bloodline highlights and their story slides in from the right.
Every zoo that has held a Northern White-cheeked Gibbon in this lineage. Click a marker for the residents of each place.
Phillip's forty-nine years. Nakai and the teddy bear. The day Vilson went missing. Citations included throughout.
The Australasian zoo population descends primarily from two wild-caught Vietnamese pairs and a handful of imported individuals. Click any individual to recentre the tree on them. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom.
Every gibbon in the dataset, with the basics at a glance. Photos are pulled live from their source pages with credit linked back, and the takedown notice in the footer covers the rights side.
Each horizontal bar is a single gibbon's life. Length is lifespan, colour is sex. Hover for the basics, click to open the full bio.
Every institution that has held a gibbon in this lineage. Click any marker for who lived there. Australasian institutions in warm gold, international ones in dark.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.
Six curated narratives drawn from the same data that feeds the rest of the site. Names of individuals are clickable, photos appear inline where available, citations underneath.
Notes on the project, sources, and how to help.
This is a working family-tree archive of Northern White-cheeked Gibbons (Nomascus leucogenys) in Australasian zoos. The species is critically endangered in the wild, and the regional captive population traces back through just a handful of wild-caught founders from Vietnam, plus a few imports from European and US zoos.
The structural data, pedigree, dates, transfers, comes from the 2009 Australasian regional studbook compiled by Clare Campbell at Perth Zoo. The story layer comes from the long-running ZooChat thread by steveroberts and contributors, plus Belinda Burns' 2015 PhD thesis on Australasian gibbon pairs and families.
Several names are spelled slightly differently across sources (Jermei or Jermeine, Viann or Vianne, Li-Lian or Lily). Where possible we use the studbook spelling and note the alternative. Many infants died before being named, we keep them in the dataset for completeness rather than hiding them.
If you can help with any of these we would be grateful. Photos of Eeyore, Vilson, Robyn or any of the Wellington-born infants. Verification of the late-2025 Kit and Smithers baby reported on ZooChat. Tao's actual birth date and origin zoo.