Diaries, notebooks, laboratory notes and field observations, correspondence, conference notes, research and lecture papers and notes, publishers' correspondence, University papers, Royal Society material, papers on conservation, psychical research, photographs and tape recordings.

An addition to the collection in 2018 includes offprints of publications by Thorpe c. 1930s-1980s and a small quantity of interfiled miscellaneous publications by others, along with a series of the newsletter "Biophone" delivered to Thorpe and then Robert Hinde at the Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour, University of Cambridge.